greatness and charm; remember their purpose, remember their variety. Follow after them,-only do not be children about them; do not idly extol them and vaunt about them; do not be jealous if you have little; do not be proud if you have much: there are differences, and all have their use; and "God hath set the members, every one in the body, as it hath pleased Him." Cultivate, as good servants, your great gifts. Be zealous for great causes which carry in them the hopes of generations to come. Appreciate all you may find here, to help you to interpret the works and the thoughts of God, to understand yourselves and the world in which you are. But there is something more. Surely there are times to most of us when, in the midst of the splendour and the hopes of visible things, it is with us as the Psalmist says: "Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?" bond deeper than that of society. and exemplar above this world. develop our full nature here;

We want a tie and We want a standard God has placed us to but He has placed us

here, we believe, still more to become like Himself.

So, while learning to understand, to value, to use the last and greatest endowments which the course of things has unfolded in human society, learning to turn them honestly to their best account for the world for which they were given, remember that there is a way for you to walk in which carries you far beyond them, and opens to you even wider prospects, more awful thoughts, a deeper train of ideas and relations and duties which touch us in what is most inward, to the very quick. We are sinners who have been saved by a God who loved us. There is a religion which is our hope beyond this time, and the incommunicable character of it is love. That which its Author thought necessary to be and to do, for a remedy and comfort to man's misery and weakness-unless man's misery and weakness are a delusion—reveals a love which makes us lose ourselves when we think of it. Love was the perpetual mark of all His life, and of the Act in which His work was finished. His religion came with a new commandment, which was love. That religion has had great fruits, and their conspicuous and distinctive feature is the love which was their motive and support. Its last word about the God whom it worshipped was that "God is love." It is the Gospel

of One, "who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross." "Let this mind be in you, which was in Him,"-love for those made in the image of God and whom God has so loved-love, self-surrendering, supreme, ever growing at once in light and warmth, of Him who made them. who has crowned our life here with gifts which baffle our measuring, and which daily go beyond our hopes, but who has "prepared for them that love Him such good things as pass man's understanding," would indeed "pour into our heart such love towards Himself that we, loving Him above all things, may obtain His promises which exceed all that we can desire, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Let us pray that He

SERMON II

CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow Me.-ST. MARK X. 21.

THE lesson for this Sunday 1 set before us the Prophet Baalam, that extraordinary character of the Old Testament in whom the experience of modern times has seen the great typical instance of self-deceiving obedience. But he is the type not only of the character which hides the truth from itself, but of that which sees it in vain. Balaam, admiring but unable to believe, looking at the order and beauty of the sacred camp, and plotting to tempt and corrupt; feeling the full grandeur of the spectacle, but able to keep from his heart, though he could not from his intellect and his lips, the confession that it was Divine,-is the warning we meet with, earlier than we should have

1 Second Sunday after Easter.

expected to find it, against every form of insincere homage to truth and religion.

It seems to me that we must always feel some fear of this danger, when, living as most of us do, we turn. to our acknowledged standards of life in the New Testament, and meet with such texts as that which I have just read. We live one kind of life, an innocent, it may be, a useful, improving, religious life; but it is not the life we read of in the New Testament; and yet that life is the one which Christians, in some sense or other, accept as their rule. We honour it, extol it, make our boast of it. But a thinking and honest man must sometimes have misgivings, when he asks himself how far his life in what he deliberately sanctions is like that set before us in the New Testament, and how much of the Gospel morality he is able practically to bring into his own. One lesson taught us by the varied experience, inherited by those on whom the ends of the world are come, is a quickened sense of the incredible facility of self-deceit. Is there not reason to be anxious, whether, when we own the New Testament as our rule of life, we are not merely making a compromise,-admiring, and not taking the responsibility of our convictions; contemplating the

D