"I am tired of life, I am sick and weary of it all; would God I were at rest!" Why? When has this heartsickness overtaken you? When has life seemed so poor and worthless? When has your soul thus preyed upon itself, filled your face with restless sadness, and sapped your health in its very springs? Was it in the seasons when faith was strong, when the vision of the unseen realities was keen, when the light of God was on your tabernacle of life? Was it when your soul was armed and paraded for duty in God's service, and your noblest powers were drawn forth and strained in work for Christ and for mankind? Nay! I see your form then, it is erect and eager; I see your eye, it flashes with ardour; I hear your voice, it rings with exultation; I catch the heart-beats, they are full and musical, and they throb with the energy of victorious life. No; no faintness then, no heart-sickness, no life weariness then; but abounding strength, abounding joy, abounding hope. There is but one thing, friends, which makes life worth having, worth living, and that makes it simply of priceless worth; it was expressed in one brief phrase by the lips of the dying Wesley: "The best of all is, God is with us."

MAN the friend of God-acquainted with His mind, sympathetic with His purposes, devoted with the passionate ardour which love inspires to the fulfilment of His will, and destined to dwell in His home and to share in all the unfolding joy and glory of His kingdom through eternity-is the idea of humanity which the Bible unveils. I cling to it because it alone seems to me to explain the scale of man's nature, it alone gives the clue to the meaning of his deepest experiences, and it alone justifies the tremendous discipline which he is called to endure.

Against this, set the image of man according to the Agnostics; the school whose lofty tone assures us that they regard themselves as the intellectual tutors of our times. Man, the highest evolution as yet of that blind force which has wrought, has pressed out from within, the successive orders of the inanimate and the animate creation; a mere product of the Creation, as absolutely as the crystal in the rock or the lichen on the wall; sharing with the creatures beneath him, though in a more developed form, all

the organs and faculties with which he is fearfully and wonderfully endowed; born, like them, of the dust, and destined, when he has fretted his little day, to settle, like them, into the dust again.

He is on safe ground, they say, and within the true compass of his powers, when he deals with the visible things around him, and the impression which they make on the nerve substance within what he thinks is himself-though what "he" means, or what right or power that which is conscious, not of the moment's impression even, but of the impression of the past moment, has to call itself a man, is a problem to which this philosophy apparently offers no satisfactory solution--but when he conceives of himself as having freedom of choice, and as being under moral obligation to the God who made him to choose the good and to hate the evil; when he talks about an immortal spirit, sin, redemption, judgment, and eternal life, he loses himself in a world of dreams.

Choose ye the picture of your nature, the vision of your destiny which seems to you most consonant with the experiences of which you are conscious, and the struggles and sufferings which you have to endure. But as for me, let me hear the voice out of the unseen and eternal world meeting my spirit in its lonely toil and battle: "Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends, for all things which I have heard of the Father I have made known unto you."

If we are shadows and pursue shadows when we

aim at the fulfilment of a Father's will, or yield to the constraints of a Saviour's love; if all that lifts us above the brutes in origin and destiny be an iridescent bubble of the imagination; then I say with the common-sense philosopher who has last undertaken to enlighten us, " It is a hard God, a hard life, and a hard world." The strong coarse natures be able to live in it with decent composure and may even comfort; but Heaven pity, it does not pretend to help, the weak, the tender, the gentle, the souls that are touched to the finest issues; life for them must be one long sharp agony, and death their best, their only friend.

I have spoken of man as a being born to be redeemed. This seems to me to be the testimony of Scripture concerning him when traced to its central idea. How he came to be what he is as a creature, is one question; what God means by him as he is, and what God intends to do with him, is another. He is here as a spiritual being consciously under a law. The Scripture tells us that he has suffered a fall, that he has lost an estate of purity and blessedness in which he was created. The school of thought which is now to the front tells us that he has suffered a rise; that he has probably grown out of an animal into a man. I say suffered a rise, for the suffering is in any case indisputable. Whether he has risen or whether he has fallen, it is as clear that he is born to sorrow as that the sparks fly upward.

This fact, with his ceaseless moaning over a lost

estate, and his utter dissatisfaction with his present condition, can be comprehended perfectly on the Scriptural theory of his nature and destiny; but it seems utterly incomprehensible on any scheme of philosophy which connects his whole nature with the dust. Being, as he is, a man, he is meant for Redemption. The whole system of things contemplates this higher evolution of humanity; the fall enters into the fundamental scheme of the Divine government; earth is made to be the theatre of the discipline whereby the fallen is to be restored. The whole Creation travails in birth of redeemed humanity, and this groaning and travailing of all things is but the beginning of that deeper and more mysterious pain, by which man the sinner is to be redeemed from the bondage of corruption, to abide with God as a friend, a son, in fairer homes than this, eternally.

Man is, as we have seen, a being born to be redeemed. We may well believe, nay, I may even say that we are bound to believe, that a merciful and righteous God would long ere this have terminated this dread experiment of freedom, and would have swept by another and yet more merciful deluge man's sin and misery together from the world, but for the Redemption in which it is the Divine purpose that all this sin and wretchedness shall fruit. Mr. Stephen says that if he were asked "if God were good," that is, disposed to promote the happiness of mankind absolutely," he should answer, "No." And if this

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1 "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," p. 310.