live as brethren in one Father's home, the world of human society will be saved.

This is the power which has abolished slavery in Christendom. It is often said that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery. It tolerated it for the time, carefully mitigating its harshness, while it was planting the principle which would strike it to the heart. Thou shalt not enslave thy brother, was the stern command. As the idea of brotherhood widened its scope, slavery narrowed its area. When men came

to understand that all men are brethren in Christ Jesus, slavery was doomed. It was by the sword of that old Jewish commandment, wielded by men who believed in the brotherhood, that slavery was killed.

This, then, is the power which is to heal and to save man in his societies and in his world. Is it not transcendently wonderful and beautiful, that it is to this life of love that God is redeeming mankind by the sacrifice of Himself? It is this life of holy, self-denying ministry which He came down to live among us, to reveal to us as the Eternal Life, wherein is the perfect and perennial bliss. The philosophers see in all ages that love is the power which helps and heals, and God has kindled by the breath of His own great love the fire of this holy life on all the sacred altars of the world. His redemptive work brought it down from the sphere of ideas to be a living, practical power. Through Christ it entered the congress of the forces which are moulding and moving society, and at once by divine right it took

the command of the whole. "Hereby know we love, because He hath laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." The heart of the whole mystery is here. We have but to lift our lives, and to help to lift mankind, to the level of this sympathy, and the problem of society is in process of solution; the world as a world is being saved.

The struggle for life which rules in the lower spheres of the Creation becomes transformed, transfigured, when it enters the human; it is thenceforth through God's redeeming touch a struggle to comfort, to cherish, and to bless. Man, lifting up his head as he emerges from the material order of Creation, and becomes consciously a spirit, with a spirit's burden of duties and destinies, is met by God with a Gospel which unveils to him the deepest mystery of spiritual being, which teaches him how to grow rich by giving, strong by serving, wise by teaching, blessed by blessing; while it opens for him a field for the expansion of his being, and for the development of his relations with God and with his fellows, which will remain boundless through eternity.

To unfold the mystery of the Divine life, this life of love, Redemption was essential. Therefore I say that man is a being born to be redeemed, and that Redemption is presupposed in the whole structure and constitution of our world. And this vision of humanity at rest at last in the arms of love, they tell me, is a dream, a fable baseless as the legend of

Utopia. Well, I confess that I recognise that Utopia joyfully as "the city which hath foundations," the "fatherland" of my spirit, which has the deepest instincts and the most passionate longings of universal humanity for its witness, the whole development of history for its harbinger, the Bible for its prophet, God for its founder, and Christ for its king.

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THE PAIN OF PROGRESS.

Thy heart shall fear, and be enlarged.”—Is. lx. 5.

ENLARGEMENT of heart is the true description of that higher progress to which it is ever the aim of God to lead us; the text pictures the process, and unfolds to us both the pain and the joy. I think that the language of the prophet is intended to present to our mind's eye that nameless dread, that inward shrinking and shuddering, with which the forecast shadows of great crises affect us as we approach them, and through which lies our passage to a larger freedom, a larger power, and a larger joy. Enlargement of heart means truly, the acquisition of a larger faculty for the reception of the thoughts and the plans of God; a new sense of the spiritual breadth and fulness of the world into which we are brought forth by Redemption, and a stirring of the faculty within us to grasp and to wield the powers and prerogatives of this loftier sphere. My soul cleaveth unto the dust, quicken thou me according to thy word,” is really a prayer for enlargement of heart. Let new vital floods permeate and purify the dust-choked channels of my being, and bring a wider breadth of

faculty within me to unfold itself to the kindling of the Divine love. The love is always around us; the sunlight of God is always shining; it is just a question of how much we display to it which it may purify and quicken, or how much we shut up within the hard, cold crust of our selfishness, and mix, not with sunlight or sun-warmth, but with dust. It is the self-infolding-the shutting ourselves up own little beggarly world, fearing to live at large, and to obey the Divine behests, having a single eye to our own narrowest interests, and no eye for the things not seen and eternal-which makes the dust the congenial field of such dull activity as the selfcentred can manifest. And it is the self-unfolding, the throwing wide the gates of the soul that the God of love may enter and claim us as His friends, and use us as His ministers in working out His great plans of blessing, which the text describes as enlargement-an enlargement of life, out of which is to grow a fuller benediction to mankind.

I often think, paradox as it may seem, that it is a sign of the lofty spiritual destiny of our race, that man instinctively cleaves to the past, and shrinks from the future. He is always for returning on the old, well-trodden path to the Paradise of his memory; it is but the loftier and more highly cultured spirits that stretch forward to the heaven of their aspirations and hopes. I have already spoken of this constant back-look of humanity; this bemoaning of a past, which, in the form in which memory cherishes it, can never be restored. It is characteristic of all heathen