That vision, we may be sure, never entirely faded. He was never afterwards the same man he had been before it. It had awakened the divine capacity in him; and it remained with him as a constant reminder of the presence of God in his life, to protect and to inspire him—"I am with thee, and I will keep thee in all places whither thou goest." Such a voice as this in a man's heart gives his life a new quality; it puts him in a new relation to all common things.

We may well believe that it was this more than anything else which drew Jacob apart from the common heathen life around him, from that day onwards. It was this which, in spite of all his weaknesses, defects, and failures in life and character, gradually raised him to a different level.

It was this which finally culminated in transforming him from Jacob the supplanter to Israel the prince of God.

So far as appears, he had gone out from his home, as so many go forth in all ages, a dull soul, though with latent capacities, his thoughts bent on securing his personal safety and his worldly success. But he woke in the desert after that vision, with the seeds of the new life rooted and growing in him.

It is this moment of awakening on which I desire to fix your thoughts—this moment of his transfiguration; when he saw and felt a heaven above him, and yet very close, with its ladder of angelic communication, which he had not so seen or felt before; the moment when a new consciousness flashed through his soul, and illumined unsuspected chambers in it, stirring new thoughts and new aspirations. He woke up to be a new man henceforth, moving in a new presence, and having always in his ears the voice of a Divine call.

Do you ask why I dwell on this familiar history, or desire that you should contemplate and realise this change in the young man Jacob? It is because there is just the same soul, the same capacity of higher life in every one of us: in some it is awake already and transfiguring their life; in others still latent, sleeping, undiscovered.

I dwell on it because it makes and will make all the difference in the world to your life whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not. This, then, is what I have to postulate as giving a value beyond the power of words to describe to every soul amongst us.

It bids us recognise and keep always before us that in every common life, of child or man, even in the most worldly or the hardest, the most frivolous, the most cynical, the most sensual, or the most degraded, there is latent, it may be altogether unfelt and disregarded through long years, giving no sign of its presence, it may be, it often is, overlaid, trodden down, even at the point of death, but still there, this living soul with all its possibilities. It is within every one of us, stamped with the image of God, and charged with unimagined possibilities.

And it must be obvious that the whole difference between any two lives, between your life and your neighbour's life, may depend on this awakening of the soul in one of you and its not awakening in the other.

Of the two brothers, Esau and Jacob, I suppose we are all drawn at the outset to Esau; our heart goes out to him, as we read, the impulsive, the impetuous, the affectionate, and we feel a corresponding dislike of Jacob's craft and cunning, and selfish calculations. There can be no doubt, we say, which was the meaner character to begin with.

But neither is there any doubt why it was that it came to be written, "Jacob I have loved, but Esau have I hated." The one was just the child of the world around him, yielding to its temptations, living by its standards. The soul in him never awoke, so as to transfigure his thoughts and purposes. The other is a man of Divine visions, inspired with the sense of a Divine presence and a Divine purpose directing him.

Nowhere do we see more clearly than in this narrative how great a change may come to any of us, if the unawakened capacities of our soul are touched by the breath of some uplifting inspiration.

As we read of this contrast between Esau and Jacob, and their destinies, we feel—and we feel it all the more because Jacob to begin with seems to be made of such common clay—we feel what a transforming power in a man's life this awaking of the soul may be.

A life which is without the inspiration that takes possession of us in the moments of this awakening, and is consequently without these visions that flash before the soul as it awakens, a life that is not deeply stirred by spiritual hopes or Divine thought, or the call to new duty, remains in one man a selfish and worldly life, in another a frivolous, in a third a sensual life. But the very same life—and here is the practical value to us, here is the hopefulness of such considerations—the very same life, when the breath of God's spirit or His penetrating voice has stirred and roused the soul in it, is felt to be transformed. The man is born anew.

"There is nothing finer," some one has said, "than to see a soul rise up in men, which amazes the very men in whom it rises." They are surprised to find that these new capacities were in them, unnoticed through their careless days, yet in them all the time. This birth of the new life, with all its promise of new tastes, new ambitions, new thoughts, new purposes, may indeed come to you without your feeling all at once how great a thing it is. At first it may be nothing more than some vision of the possibilities of your life, or some electric flash of new consciousness that runs through you, or the sharp pang of remorse for some sin or some neglect, or the flush of shame or repulsion as you think of something or other in your life, or the glow of some good resolution to begin some new life or new duty, or take some new turn, or pursue some new aim. You hardly think perhaps of this as the awakening of your soul. It may never have occurred to you to think of it as being just as sacred a thing as was Jacob's vision at Bethel, as being indeed the work of the same Divine spirit.

But let us consider it a little further. Whatever it is that is thus stirring in your heart, it comes and it comes again; it lingers in your thoughts and feelings; it haunts, it impresses and awes you; it rises before you suddenly and stops you from some sin, or, if it fails to stop you, it turns the pleasure for which you craved into wretchedness; or it encourages and consoles you in some hour of weakness or sorrow. I suppose there is hardly one of you who has not had some such experience as this. And if you ask. What is it? It is, I repeat, the awakening of the soul in you—nothing less than this—and happy is it for you, if you recognise that it is the soul striving to win its proper place in the regulation of your life.

When Moses saw the vision of the burning bush, and suddenly felt himself on holy ground; when Elijah heard the still, small voice calling, "What doest thou here, Elijah?" when Saul, on his way to Damascus, fell to the ground conscience-smitten, crushed, blinded, rebuked; when the child Samuel heard the Divine voice calling to him in the darkness of the night;—in each case it was the awakening or the reawakening of the soul—the uprising of the spiritual capacities, the vision of the higher life—and so exactly with all of you. Are you not sometimes conscious of the uprisings in you of a spirit calling upon you to recognise the angels' ladder that connects your life also with the heaven above us?

If so, there is this further thing to note about such moments of experience.

This feeling of some spiritual capacity in you, this call to some higher view of life and duty, this uprising of the moral sense and the repulsion towards the lower forms of life which comes with it—this is God's personal gift to us, and we pray that you may possess it early; for it is not only a new consciousness, it is itself a new power in your life.

You cannot have it, feeling its presence and hearing its suggestions, and debase your life in any way, as you might have done, but for its presence. It is so very true that, in the life of the Spirit, looking up means lifting up. As the plant turns to the sun, it grows towards the sun; as it looks up to the light, it grows towards the light; so it is with us. We feel that we are sons of God, and we tend to become so. Through some influence or other, we awake to a vivid consciousness that God has created us in His image, endowed us with Divine capacities, and this consciousness becomes a purifying and inspiring force in our life, and it is a new life in consequence.

Pray that such influences may prevail around you here, and that you may hold them fast until they have blessed your life.



XI. "MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER."

"So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another."—ROMANS xii. 5.

There are some moral and spiritual truths which it seems to be almost impossible to impress upon the practical life of the world, although they meet with a sort of universal acceptance.

Men agree with them, they re-echo them, they applaud them; they do everything, in fact, but exhibit them as the moving, inspiring, and guiding truths of their daily practice.

And among these I fear we must still class that one which is expressed in the text I have just read, a text which sets forth the fundamental fact that whatever else Christianity may teach, it teaches as one of its first and principal lessons that a Christian man has to live in Christ for his neighbours.

If such a text means anything, it means that Christianity is essentially a religion of society, that it sets before us social claims as standing before all other claims; that, starting from the Divine Sacrifice as the central fact of human life, it was intended to root out of our hearts the noxious weed of selfishness by the power of the Divine love, and to build up the organisation of men in their common relationships upon this new basis.

It may sound somewhat strange to speak at this time of day of what Christianity is intended to do, rather than what it has done already.

But it is even more strange to read the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and all the other words of the Lord; all the lessons of His life and His sacrifice; the history of the first generation of Christians; the descent of the Spirit upon them; and the teaching of the apostolic brotherhood—to remember that all this is our accepted faith; that it has been the faith of one generation after another for eighteen hundred years; that we grow up in this faith, live in it, and die in it; and at the same time to contemplate side by side with it all the elements of the common life, all the rules and customs of society, all the standards of conduct which ordinary men take as their measure of daily duty and purpose.

Thus, whilst on the one hand Christian influences, and all the changes in the world's life which are due to them, fill us with wonder and gratitude, the failures of Christianity are scarcely less impressive.

When we consider the ordinary run of men's lives, so different for the most part in spirit, and in aim and guiding rules, from that type which the New Testament sets before us, it would almost seem as if to the majority their religion was not a ruling and dominating principle, pervading this present life, but only an ideal, shedding around us a glow of indefinite hopes and possibilities, an ideal hardly to be realised, laid up somewhere in the heavens—[Greek text]. These contrasts between the revelation of the Gospel and the standards of the Christian world have always troubled the most earnest spirits in every generation. Some of you remember, no doubt, how this contrast between Christian profession and the life of selfish sin and waste flashed into fierce poetry in one such spirit of the last generation, who grew up in this school.

"Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I passed, With fiercer heat than flamed above my head My heart was hot within me, till at last My brain was lightened when my tongue had said Christ is not risen."

And men who are truly in earnest about faith and life, and who are perplexed and distressed by the contradictions and insincerities that meet them, must often be moved as he was.

And yet, when we look closer, and consider that the battle of spiritual progress has this peculiarity attached to it, that it has to be fought over again, in every generation, and in every separate individual soul, the result is less surprising. Remembering this, we do not expect the victory of the last generation to save us from defeat or failure.

And this has to be borne in mind equally in regard to the continuous life of societies and to our own separate lives. Thus in such a society as this, if our predecessors uplifted the standards of conduct, inculcated high principles, and inspired their generation with a strong pervading spirit, this should make it easier for us to do likewise; but it does not insure our doing it. All this higher life will die in our hands if the same regenerating spirit is not alive and working in our hearts also. So, again, your individual victory over sin in the power of the Spirit in you, does not save my life from having to fight the battle for itself and win its own victories.

So that, however perplexing the phenomena of life may seem whilst we look at them in the mass or from the outside, if we read the Gospel of Christ as a message to our own souls a great deal of the perplexity disappears. And it was with this personal message that Christ came, and there is no hope of our understanding His mission, or of living in the light of His transforming spirit, if we think of it in any other way than this.

The purpose of His revelation is to crucify the selfish instinct in us, and to rouse us to the life of self-devotion, to the idea of consecrated energies; and this being so, all Christian life is of the nature of a warfare; and a warfare which begins afresh with each generation of men; because selfishness, with all its tribe of attendant appetites and passions, springs afresh in every single soul, and is nurtured, strengthened, cultivated, by so many of the conditions of life.

If, then, the Spirit of Christ is really to prevail in our life, it must be by effecting our emancipation from selfish instincts, and rousing in us the spirit of devotion to the good of other lives.

In proportion as you diminish selfishness in your own life or in any other, by fostering generous affections and cultivating the spirit of social duty and religious aspiration, by walking in the footsteps of Christ and living in the light of His presence, you are laying the only possible foundation of any lasting progress, you are following the one true method by which the mystery of sin is to be overcome.

We may wonder that this should be so difficult; for of selfishness we should say that we all dislike it. In its grosser forms we repudiate it. The very word is one which we articulate with a certain accent of contempt.

But when we come to its refined and subtle workings in our nature, when we think of its Proteus-like changeableness, its power of assuming the various guises even of duty or religion; when we reflect how it can clothe itself in the choicest garb of art, or science, or divine philosophy, we find very likely that we are always in danger of being enslaved by it.

And we do well to pray in all sincerity that grace may expel our selfishness; for indeed the influence of true religion is to be gauged by the extent to which this prayer is being fulfilled in us. The fulfilment of it is what we mean by the regenerate life.

I need not ask you how you feel in the presence of any character which you recognise as cleansed from all taint of selfishness, a character, softened, refined, purified, inspired, consecrated. I would rather ask whether you know of any personal influence to be compared with that of such a character.

And if, as I anticipate, you would answer that there is none like it, I would ask you to bear in mind that this influence may be yours. You are invited by all the highest calls within and around you to make it yours. "What is the aim and purpose of his life?" is a question which men are justified in asking about us; and they are justified in passing their verdict upon us by the answer which our life gives.

Does he live for himself, they will ask, for his own pleasures, his own delights, be they coarse or refined, his own indulgence, his own particular interest? Is there anything of the spirit or enthusiasm of sacrifice visible in the ordinary tenor of his actions?

The world, this Christian world, is full of those concerning whom the answer to such questions can only be a distinct negative; and yet we know that in all such characters, whether in youth or age, Christianity is a failure.

Therefore we shall accept it as our primary duty, the purpose of our existence as a Christian school, to train up men who shall be penetrated by the spirit of unselfishness, possessed by the feeling that their lives are to be consecrated to the common good.

Societies differ very widely in the type of character they impress.

Here and there we see a society, here and there a school, which has somehow acquired the power to stamp on those who go out from it a certain impress of nobility.

They go forth like the knights of our famous English legend—imperfect no doubt and erring, but each one of them inspired with the consciousness that his life is a holy quest.

There are other societies and schools among them which seem to possess everything but this one power.

What, then, are we to say of our hopes? What is to be the mission of our generation here? Shall we contribute anything to raise the common type? Or shall we drift on as the world drifts, a little better, or a little worse?

Shall we not rather pray and hope as we begin once more to weave the web of mutual influence, that you may grow up here not altogether like the herd of common men, but emancipated early from the life of selfish desire, feeling the spirit of Christ within you, remembering your baptismal vows, with eyes open to heavenly visions, and not disobedient unto them?



XII. THE SOWER AND THE SEED.

"A sower went out to sow his seed."—ST. LUKE viii. 5.

It is significant that the first of the Saviour's parables is the parable of the sower, that the first thing to which He likens His own work is that of the sower of seed, the first lesson He has to impress upon us by any kind of comparison is that the word of God is a seed sown in our hearts, a something which contains in it the germ of a new life.

It is no less significant that He returns so often to this same kind of comparison for the purpose of impressing us always with the primary fact, that our relationship to God, the Father of Spirits, in other words our spiritual condition at the present moment, our hope for the time to come, does not depend upon some body of doctrine, but on our having received into the secret places of the heart the seeds of a new life.

This is suggestive of a great many considerations which touch our life very closely; but I will not turn aside to them at this moment, as my desire is to fix your thoughts for the present on this one fundamental thing, that the principle of moral and spiritual life in you is a seed, and as such it is endowed with a power of independent separate growth; it was intended to grow in you.

The sower casts his seed upon the earth and goes his way, and, once sown, it springs up and grows, as Jesus said in another parable, "he knoweth not how." This, then, is the truth which He is impressing on our attention, when He speaks of His revelation as a seed, a seed to be sown by hands which have no control over it except to sow it. The soul of each and every one of us is a seed-field, and the seeds of new life and purpose should be growing in it.

As we recall the other parable of the seed growing secretly, recorded in St. Mark's Gospel, we feel even more strongly how the essence of all our life is in seeds of influence. "So is the Kingdom of Heaven as if a man should cast seed upon the earth, and the seed should spring up and grow, he knoweth not how." It grows in us mysteriously we know not how.

And I am not sure that we all, indeed I think it likely that we do not all, take it home to our thoughts with sufficient seriousness that this mysterious growth in the thing sown implies a mysterious vital power or force which is inherent in it.

I call it a mysterious vital power, because all life is a mystery to us. The very thought of life lands us in mystery, in mystery which defies analysis. We know that all the life in us and around us follows certain laws, as we call them, the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of man, each following its own laws after its kind, and that is all we know about it. We can observe its action, its uniformities, its sequences, and variations, but beyond this we cannot penetrate its secret. It grows mysteriously, we know not how.

But this much we know, that no life is spontaneously generated. The science of our day has demonstrated it, as we believe, beyond dispute, that you cannot create life out of dead matter. All life comes from some antecedent life. Wherever you see life of any kind, you know that there must have been before it some form of life which was its parent.

Yet again, the scientific investigator points out another suggestive fact, that the lower creature does not of its own lower nature expand into the higher, but that life is lifted up and grows by the infusion of something higher than itself. So, too, we believe that the Spirit of God touches with its mysterious power the dead souls of men; it transforms them, it uplifts them, they are born again. They are roused and stirred to new capacity by the touch and inspiration of this Divine life. This is what is meant when it is said that if any man be in Christ he is a new creature. He has received into his nature this mysterious gift, or rather this seed of the new life.

Such is the Christian doctrine of the new birth, or of the life-giving breath of the Spirit, or of the sowing the seed of Divine life in us. You may describe it how you please, if only you take due note of this, that in proportion as you realise or accept this truth as in any way intimately connected with your own personal life and conduct, all the common things around you acquire a new importance, and I might even say some touch of sacredness, because they are felt to be strewn with these seeds of influence which God is sowing around us, with a hand that never rests, through all our years, in uncounted ways.

This seed of new life which is to save you from the power of sin and the flesh and give you new aspirations, purer tastes, stronger purposes, need I remind you how it is sown, in what manifold and various ways? It must be within the personal experience of some of you to testify how your meetings in this chapel every morning may sow it. One day it falls on your heart in some word of some hymn or prayer, or in some thought or feeling which flashes through you, or some pricking of conscience for no other knows what sin or fault, or in some new resolve.

Sometimes it is found that a passing word of a preacher sows it (it is in this hope I preach to you), or again it is sown in the common ways of daily life, by the reading of some book, or by the word or example of a friend, or by some casual sight or experience. We remember how the seed of an unresting and beneficent life, a life devoted to the good of the poor and the suffering, was sown in Lord Shaftesbury by the shocking sight of a pauper funeral when he was a boy at Harrow. So it may be sown in your hearts you know not beforehand when or where, to grow up and bear fruit an hundred fold.

The wind bloweth where it listeth—so is every one that is born of the Spirit. You never know what Divine seed it may deposit in your heart at any moment; but this you do know, that if the word of Christ be true, whenever this gift of life comes to you it is a new birth.

And there is all the more mystery and sacredness about our common life just because we never know how or when these seeds may fall upon our life to bless it, and because men are often altogether unconscious of the beginnings of their growth in them. Some seed of good influence falls into the soil of their heart, and seems to lie there buried in the winter of neglect or waste.

Thus some men may carry the seeds long and far, not knowing the power or the potency of the life that is in them; but some day they strike root and grow and bear fruit in new convictions, or in new desires and purposes; and this may be the case with any one amongst us, and hence it is natural that we should press the question on ourselves and on each other—What are you making of those seeds of higher life which have been sown in you by your mother's love, by your father's words, by all the lessons and influences of such a place as this, seeds which are falling around you continually, and may possibly be trodden down or overlaid?

As we look at these parables of the Lord telling of this sowing and this growth of seeds, they bring it home to us very forcibly that the only true test of life in Christ is growth in Christian graces. And this brings us to a consideration of grave practical importance. It bids us be very careful to distinguish between seeds of life taking root in the heart and springing up into new activities, and mere waves of impression. The seed springs up and grows in you, the wave merely flows over you, lifting and moving you for a moment, and then leaving you as before. Thus, and it is a warning which is not unneeded in our day, a day of much emotional religion, there is all the difference in the world between a religion of moods and a religion of growth. The one is the plaything of the winds, the other is rooted in Christ.

Thus I am brought to two reflections, one on the function and aim of the preacher, the other the duty of the hearer of God's word. The preacher—and the same might be said of every master in such a society as this—the preacher has to think of himself primarily and chiefly as a servant of Christ charged with the duty of sowing the seeds of spiritual life in your hearts. And the thought that the Saviour has revealed to us seeds of life which have this regenerating power in them, and that in Him we see what possibilities of growth there are in these seeds—this is our constant encouragement.

The sower's hand may be feeble, and his sowing may be awkward, or halting, or uncertain, but there is a Divine force or possibility in all seeds of truth, or purity, or right feeling which he scatters among you, independent of his sowing, and he never knows in what soul some seed may lodge and germinate and grow up and bear fruit here and hereafter, even to the endless life.

So we believe that every work of good influence, whether of man or boy, will prosper, because we remember it as a part of God's providential law, that His seed if sown grows of itself, mysteriously. And we need not wonder at the mystery, for it is the Spirit of God which is in the seed; and it is ready to swell and grow and bear new fruits as it lodges in your heart.

Through and in that seed of good influence it is God Himself who is working in you.

Such, as we learn from the word of Christ, such, as we see it exemplified in His person, is the mystery of the Divine life in the hearts of men—not in some other lives, but in your life and mine.

But this only leads us to another vital question—a question which I leave with you for the present, and to which we may return another day—What is your share of active duty in regard to these seeds of good influence and good purpose that are sown in you; what are you doing, and what are you intending to do, to secure that they shall be bearing some fruit in your own daily life?



XIII. THE LENTEN FAST.

"This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer."—ST. MARK ix. 29.

You remember the narrative from which I have taken this verse. Jesus, as we read, had just come down from the Mount of Transfiguration, and when He was come to the multitude, a certain man besought him saying, "Have mercy on my son, for he is lunatic and sore vexed, and I brought him to Thy disciples, but they could not cure him." Then Jesus rebuked the devil, and the child was cured from that hour. Thereupon His disciples came to Him with this inquiry—"Why could not we cast him out? And He said to them, Because of your little faith. This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer;" or, as our Authorised Version has it, "by prayer and fasting."

Here, then, we have set before us a very striking and significant contrast: the contrast between the spiritual power of Jesus fresh from the Mount of Transfiguration, and the want of such power in His disciples, who represent to us the common life of the multitude and the plain. His reply to their question was clearly intended to suggest to them the cause of their spiritual feebleness. Do you wonder at your lack of power over the diseases of the soul? "This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer." Now, this suggestive answer is very appropriate for our consideration at the present time when we are approaching the season of Lent, which has been observed century after century as a special season of fasting, prayer, and penitence for sin, through all the Christian Church.

When we think of these weeks, it is reasonable to believe that such observance, so universal, so long continued, must have satisfied some deep need of the heart, especially as it is not based on any particular dogma. And this incident in the Saviour's life, and these emphatic words of His, may help us to a clearer understanding of the value of such times. They declare to us the principle of the spiritual harvest, that, in the spiritual life as in all else, we reap as we sow. They are intended to convey to us this plain lesson, that if any of us give little thought, attention, or effort to that side of our life which we speak of as the spiritual, if there is in our daily habit and practice little real prayer or self-denial, or devotion, little communing with God, little endeavour to live in the spirit of Christ, and if, this being so, we find ourselves weak or vacillating in our struggle against sin or evil, whether in our own life or in society, there is nothing surprising in such a result.

It is in our religious life just as in everything else—spiritual carelessness or neglect must mean spiritual weakness. In all other matters we look for results in some proportion to our efforts. As we sow we expect to reap.

Here, for instance, in your daily life, if you wish to excel in any particular game or pursuit, you practise it with diligence. You know that, without such practice or concentration of effort upon it, any expectation of excellence is simply foolish.

In your school work you recognise the same conditions. Intellectual growth may seem sometimes to come slowly, in spite of all your efforts; but it comes with certainty if you persevere, and it is equally certain that it hardly ever comes at all to those who use no effort.

If, then, you look for progress or distinction, you know that you must fix your thoughts upon your work, and practise industry, and, above all, that you must cultivate a love of learning, so that your mind lingers over it with some sense of enjoyment.

You do not expect a harvest where you have not sown. And it is just this same law which you recognise and accept in other matters that our Lord is here declaring to us as the law of spiritual power.

Do we desire to cast any evil influence or any weakness out of our life? Do we ask despairingly how it is that we have not been able to cast it out? Our Lord's answer comes to us in these emphatic words—"This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer."

In other words, if we really desire that our soul shall be cleansed and strengthened, we must surrender it to Him in prayer and self-denial, in spiritual exercises and communion, that He may cure it of its sin or its weakness, and inspire us with new life.

Prayer and fasting are in this word of His the symbol of all special exercises of the spirit, as it strives to get free from the burden of the flesh and to come nearer to God; and without such exercises, He presses it on us if we stand in need of such reminders, we cannot hope for any harvest of spiritual strength.

And we can hardly have failed to notice how His own practice corresponds with His warnings and injunctions.

Before He began His ministry we read of His forty days' fast in the wilderness; and at every turn, in the course of it, we read again and again incidentally of His constant withdrawals into privacy with God.

His short life on earth was a life of spiritual ministry. All the common things of life were to Him so many illustrations of some spiritual lesson of the Father's love and care, or of man's dependence on Him. In every voice of the world there was the undertone of some spiritual suggestion. So that we might say—Surely His days were one unbroken course of spiritual work and communion, and He could need no special seasons or exercises; but His example teaches us a different lesson.

As if to bring it home to us beyond all possibility of doubt or question, that the most devoted, the most active, and most powerful spiritual characters, will always be those whose communion with God in private prayer and exercise is most constant and intense, He Himself was continually withdrawing for such communion; and there are no more suggestive passages in the Gospels for our guidance than those incidental references which tell us, as if by chance, giving us passing glimpses into the unrecorded portions of His life, how on one occasion He retired into a mountain apart to pray, or how on another he spent the whole night apart in prayer, or how he was in a desert place apart in prayer.

These withdrawals of Jesus into the solitude of the desert or the mountain, these hours in which He was alone with the Father, are but another name for those exercises of prayer, fasting, meditation, communion with God, without which, as He tells His followers in the text I have read to you, it is not possible to eradicate from the soul those influences of sin which destroy its harmony and undermine its strength.

These withdrawals were His times of spiritual refreshment; and by His practice He declares to us His need of them. And if in His case they were necessary, much more are they necessary for you and me, entangled as we are amidst all the varied influences of our common life, and with natures prone to sin.

Hence it is that the Church has set apart this season of Lent to come round to us year by year as a season of special thought and prayer and self-denial. Many other times and seasons come to us laden with the same spiritual influences, and to be used by us as times of reflection, inspiration, purification, and strengthening. This is the purpose which the quiet of these recurring Sundays should be fulfilling in our lives, or our gatherings for Holy Communion.

And once and again there comes to us in the course of life some time or season which is sure to make its impression upon our soul as having brought us in a special sense into the presence of God, and within the overshadowing influences of His Spirit.

So it may happen to us that some family bereavement, the death of father or mother, of brother or sister, or child of our affections, draws us away from the world into a closer communion with our Father in Heaven, a communion which is never entirely lost again or forgotten. So, too, comes the season of confirmation, as to many of you just now, with all its thoughts, feelings, prayers, and resolutions.

And it is a happy thing for our life when any of these seasons leave an indelible mark upon our memory and our spirit.

But as we think of these words of Jesus, "This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"—the question for each of us here to-day is, what practical daily meaning we hope to give to this season of Lent which is to begin on Wednesday.

Let us not fancy that we can allow such seasons to come and go, year by year, giving them no thought or attention, without some corresponding loss.

The voice of humanity, and the experience of centuries, the practice of holy men, and the example and the words of Christ Himself, have all testified to the need there is for the spiritual observance of such times, if men are to keep their soul alive in them—and who are we that we should venture to set ourselves against such overpowering testimony?

Let us rather address ourselves seriously to making these weeks a time of some special exercise or discipline such as our life may need.

There is hardly one of us but will confess, if he thinks of the matter at all, that the world is too much with us; that its influence is too strong upon us; that we are too ready to conform to its ways and follow its indulgences. And such a confession is equivalent to an acknowledgment that we need these Lenten seasons. And if with this feeling in our hearts we use the coming weeks with any definite purpose, praying to be rid of some temptation or weakness, or to be endowed with some strength, or to be supported in some good purpose, we are sure to recognise with thankfulness, when the time is over, that it has indeed proved a time of some dislodgment, that some temptation or habit has fallen away from us and left us free, so that some new spirit or purpose has begun to grow in us.

We shall, in fact, be conscious, as the weeks go on, that a new life of new tastes and new satisfactions has sprung up, as the first fruits of our prayer. If we doubt the need of such exhortations as these, let us reflect for a moment—Does it not sometimes happen to us that our souls are only too like the soul of that sick child in the Gospel?

Good instincts, and intentions, and tendencies, are clearly felt and recognised, but they are fitful, weak, and intermittent. Another spirit seems to lay hold of us and carry us whither it will.

If in any sense this can be said to be your case, then remember, that just what the Saviour's healing word was to that child, sick and possessed, as He met it on His way from the Hill of Transfiguration, and breathed over it the spirit of the higher life, reducing the chaos of the soul to harmony, and bringing reason out of madness, and freedom out of demoniac possession, these holy seasons of time-honoured observance may be to your soul, if you use them reverently, and as God's appointed means for your growth in the Spirit.



XIV. GOD'S CURSE ON SIN.

"Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin."—EZEKIEL xviii. 30.

These words of Ezekiel may be understood as expressing in the prophet's language what the Book of Deuteronomy expresses in such denunciations as those which were read to us the other day in the Commination Service.

They correspond also to the warning of St. Paul when he says—"Be not deceived; God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall reap corruption; and he that soweth to the spirit shall reap everlasting life." Or again they correspond to that question which is put to us in the Epistle to the Hebrews—"If every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense and reward, how shall we escape?"

Thus we find in the Pentateuch, in Ezekiel, and in the apostolic writings the representatives of three very different stages of religious enlightenment, all teaching us in effect the same lesson, to remember the recompense that sin never fails to bring upon him who commits it. As we listen to the curses of Deuteronomy on one sin and on another, and then read the language of Ezekiel or St. Paul, we are conscious of a difference in the modes of thought and expression. The thought of the apostle is separated from that of the lawgiver or the prophet of the Old Testament by the new revelation and the sacrifice of Jesus; but yet underneath all differences their judgment on every sinful act or habit remains spiritually the same. They all alike bid us, when we think of our sins, to think also of the inevitable punishment which rises behind them like their shadow; and to bear in mind that the root of the whole matter is the one incontrovertible and never-changing fact of human life that as you sow you must expect to reap—he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.

Now, inasmuch as your early years are the seed-time of your life, these stern reminders that if you sow any sin in your soul you will some day reap its curse, that God will judge you every one according to his ways, all this is very appropriate for your consideration. And you are likely to be all the more serious about your present life and its habits, tastes, and purposes if this thought really takes possession of you, that there is in fact a very close analogy between the life of the soul and life around us in the outer world, and that every seed we sow in it grows after its own kind.

In the region of animal or vegetable life you see and recognise this law on every side. You trace it sometimes as the law of improvement by culture, sometimes as the law of degeneration.

You cultivate and tend a garden or a field, sowing, planting, eradicating, and the growths of flower or fruit improve in proportion to your care; but leave it to itself and the weeds choke it, and the very fruit degenerates; your rose becomes a dog-rose—it reverts, as men say, to a lower type.

So exactly is it with your own life; so long as it is grafted into a life higher than your own, so long as good purposes are being sown in it and good habits cultivated, and the bad weeded out and the Spirit of God breathes through it, it is growing nearer to the Divine type; but neglect it, or follow sinful impulse or low taste, and it becomes like the garden of weeds; degeneracy begins at once, it is changing to something worse, it is reverting to a lower type.

This is a way of expressing it which is sufficiently familiar to you. But this is only our modern way of looking at those facts of life which were eloquent to men of earlier times as the curse of God.

As, then, it is undoubtedly true that—

"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk with us still,"

these stern warnings which our Lenten services hold up before us are of the greatest value.

Keeping before us this law that in every region of life it is the tendency of everything to bear fruit after its kind, we shall feel that we can hardly impress it too deeply upon our minds that there is no sin which we commit but will assuredly return upon our own heads. The Israelites in the Old Testament saw the hand of God thus visiting their sins upon them in many ways. They thought of Him as smiting them for their sins with consumption or with fever, with plague or mildew, or the sword of the oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learnt that it is not with such visitations that God punishes us for our sinful indulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may be less obvious but is often more ruinous than these.

Neglect the opportunities of good with which He strews your path in early life, let some sin strike its roots in your heart and take possession of it, and the curse of God for that neglect or that sin will overtake you, no doubt of it; coming not perhaps as the Israelite on Mount Ebal expected it to come for any sin of his, but coming, you hardly know how, as the change for the worse, the sinking to lower levels of thought, and taste, and aim, and practice, the reversion to lower types, which is the end of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the power of sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. So the curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible and unchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows not old, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally in the language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery: "Sow neglect," it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, and you will reap corruption."

This vision of the ultimate results of evil is a very ugly one, put it in whatever shape you will, and we are naturally somewhat loth to look it in the face. We would rather not think of any sin of ours as entailing such consequences. This conception of Divine justice or retribution embodied in the action of unbending laws and declaring that death is the fruit of sin, and that death must come of it, this is no doubt a conception which inspires awe. We shrink from it; we hardly dare to say Amen! to its dread utterances. We should like, it may be, to shut our eyes to the fact and dwell rather on the thought that our God is long-suffering and of great kindness and of tender mercy. It is more soothing to think of love than of retribution, or of the arm that shelters or upholds us than of the hand that smites; but the real question should be—"Is it true, this declaration that as we sow we reap, that the wages of sin is death, death of faculty, death of hope?" It is foolish to blink the sterner aspects of life. The fruit of such blinking and turning aside is very often the very thing we do not like to think of—indulgence and its retribution. Divine love and goodness and long-suffering cannot occupy too much of our thoughts and prayers; for it is through these that the heart is touched, and the spirit is fostered in us, and we awake to the new life in Christ.

But if we shrink from contemplating that law of Divine retribution, which works in men's lives side by side with the law of mercy and love, it is time for us to ask ourselves—"How is it that I thus shrink from the thought of these penalties?"

There is indeed one sense in which we naturally shrink from the thought that the wages of sin is death, even while we acknowledge that it is so. It is inexpressibly sad to dwell on the infinite mass of sin which is daily bearing its bitter and deadly fruit in the world, and propagating itself after its kind; to think of the untold number of darkened or misguided souls that have sown to the flesh, and are going in consequence down to failure and death, blighted, corrupted, ruined. From this thought we naturally turn to the thought of God's mercy, and pray that He may yet sow the seeds of new hope in the dismal waste of such lives.

But it happens to us, I fear sometimes, that this thought of God's curse on sin sends a chill through the heart, and we shrink away from it, because of our own unregenerate life, because of the fascination which sinful impulse or habit exercises over us.

If the warning voice of our Lenten Commination Service has convicted any one of us of this motive for shrinking from its stern sentence, it has come to us as a true messenger of the God who has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. We need the voice of these threatenings, because the heart has such a great power of self-deception in it. Men find it so easy to thrust away into the dim background of their thoughts all the dark but sure consequences of present sins, treating them as a debt which will come up no doubt for payment some day, but may be put aside just now.

And one virtue of our stern plain-speaking Lenten services is this, that they will not allow us to forget that fated reckoning day—they put us, whether we like it or not, face to face with the sure consequences of sin; and they compel us to listen to the question—"What is the choice of thy life?"

For you will bear in mind that we read all these decrees of Divine law with our eye fixed on our own life and not on our neighbour. They are meant to help us to judge ourselves, and not some other person; they lead us to penitence and not to criticism, so that our readiness or our unwillingness to meet and to weigh them, and to respond to them with definite prayer and penitence, may be taken as an index of our religious sincerity, and of our readiness to consecrate our lives to the service of our Saviour Christ.

And it is well for us that we should ask ourselves these questions; for if indeed it is true that every transgression and disobedience shall receive its just recompense and reward, how else shall we escape?



XV. THE CONFLICT WITH EVIL.

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."—ST. MATTHEW vi. 13.

It is good for us sometimes to stand still for a moment and consider our use of very familiar words. And this petition may appropriately illustrate our need of such an exercise.

It is on your lips every day. Every Sunday you offer it you hardly know how many times, in private and in public prayer: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." And the moment you stop to think about it you feel—who does not?—that it is a very solemn and moving petition if you offer it before God in sincerity, and with an honest desire to be kept out of the way of sin; but it becomes a fearful mockery if it is offered with unclean lips, or by one who is living in any sort of sinful practice, either secret or open.

And yet, as we all know, it is possible to do this, making the prayer mere lip service, under the influence of daily custom. This, then, is the question it suggests to us whenever we stop to think about it: How far are we endeavouring to keep our lives in accordance with the spirit of such a petition? "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Most of you, I can well believe, would not voluntarily or deliberately step out of your way to meet a temptation, or to seek any evil course of life. You would not do it of your own free choice, or in cold blood, as we say. This, at any rate, is your own feeling about sin, whether the feeling is consistent with your life or not. As you contemplate any low form of life in another, you recognise its ugliness and its degrading character, and you call it very likely by the name it deserves. If, then, you find yourself involved in any sin, in spite of these feelings, and although you take this daily prayer upon your lips, how comes it to be so? How comes it that you remain in this pitiable condition?

Your answer is, perhaps, that temptation comes upon you unawares, and that it takes you by surprise; or it seems to watch for some moment of forgetfulness or weakness; or you fight against a temptation, but still it clings to you as if it had a life of its own and were independent of you; or you are drawn into sin you scarcely know how; or you are driven into it by some one whom you fear although you despise him; or it seems to you to be in the very air you breathe. And although such answers explanatory of a life of sin or waste are no real excuse for it, they are very often quite true. If it were not so, the devil would not be the dangerous enemy that he assuredly is to our spiritual life; our risk of failure in our battle with sin would not be so great as experience shows it to be. We must therefore expect that temptations to sin will sometimes come upon us quite by surprise and at unlocked for moments, and that some temptations will linger and cling to us with a hateful persistence; you must be prepared also to find that some companion may draw you towards a sin, or a bully may endeavour to drive you into it. Your life is a happy one if it is free from all such risks, but you cannot count upon such freedom. So that, if any one begins his life thinking that his conflict with evil and its manifold temptations is going to be an easy one, he begins under a dangerous delusion, and he is likely to end in some disastrous failure.

You desire, let us hope, to keep your soul unstained by evil ways. If, then, you remember that to secure such a stainless and unpolluted life you have not only to fight with some external enemy now and then, but against dark and insidious powers of evil which seem to start up around you and in the very citadel of your heart unawares, and that except through a constant sense of God's presence in your life you cannot hope to keep free from their influence, this feeling should give reality and earnestness to our daily prayer to be delivered from the evil.

And, indeed, this feeling that our life is set in the midst of many and great dangers is one of the first requisites for its moral safety. It stands beside us with its warning, whenever a temptation to some sin besets us, reminding us that, no matter how pleasant or attractive the temptation may seem to be, or how trifling the sin that it suggests, it is in fact an outpost of a great army, whose name is legion, and that we should hold no parleyings and have no dealings with it, for it breathes corruption, and it brings degradation and death behind it.

"Obsta principiis" may indeed be said to be a warning specially needed by us in regard to every kind of temptation. But we may go further than this. Our safety from particular sins depends very often and very largely, at a critical moment, upon our general attitude and feeling towards sin in every shape.

It must be acknowledged, I think, that most sins which lay their hold upon us and master us, or struggle long and hard for the mastery, make their first entrance into the soul so easily, because they find it swept and garnished for their reception, and its doors wide open. With reference to this you have only to reflect on some chapter of your own experience. Has it never happened that, when some wrong or sinful act or thought or speech was first presented to you, it stirred a feeling of shrinking, or strong dislike, or fear, or uneasiness, or, it may be, disgust; but instead of listening to that warning voice, and spurning the temptation utterly, as your feeling bade you do, you were attracted somehow to turn and gaze upon it. You knew it to be sin, but you felt no repulsion. Your soul was not garrisoned and defended by any strong sense of the hatefulness and deadly influence of all sin as such; so if you fled from it it was with a backward look; and then you allowed yourself to think of it in others, or you lived on friendly and familiar terms with those who were stained by it; possibly you even jested about it; you let your thoughts feed upon it; you expressed no stern disapproval of it; you allowed the atmosphere of your life to be tainted by it; and at last your adversary the devil, having rejoiced to see his wiles thus gathering round you, saw you slip or plunge into the sin, and go one great step nearer to becoming his bondslave—just as some foolish bird, fluttering this way and that instead of spreading its wings for a heavenward flight into the pure and safe upper air, might plunge into the snares of the fowler. And yet all the while, although you were living this weak and vacillating life, which is the seed-field of sin, you were praying to God every day—"Lead us not into temptation."

If we remember any such experience we may at least gather from it some lessons of safety and strength for the time to come. It reminds us first of all how vitally important is our general attitude towards every form of sin and its allurements. On this attitude it very often depends whether your life is to be comparatively free from pitfalls, or whether it is to be beset with dangers at every turning. If by your attitude and behaviour you cause it to be felt that sin is hateful to you, and that you are sincere when you pray that God may keep you from all evil, a great many of the temptations that would otherwise make your life difficult and dangerous will shrink away abashed; or if the tempter ventures to assail you, he will do it half-heartedly when he sees that you repel him with a whole-hearted repugnance. It is this attitude even more than individual acts which fixes the tone of a society.

When there is no prevalent sense that there are those present who maintain this attitude of hatred and contempt for sin and everything that breeds or fosters it, the tone, as men say, becomes low, or lax, the air becomes corrupt, and life in such surroundings becomes full of peril. If the good are timid, shrinking, showing no positive fervour, no zeal for virtue, and no moral indignation against evil influence, then the bad in their society will lift up their heads and walk boldly. But when, on the other hand, they who are in their hearts convinced of the sinfulness of sin, and of the infinite mischief that may arise out of any form of it, are not ashamed to show it by their attitude, they cause the base to hide itself in its proper darkness, and they create an atmosphere around them in which temptations lose a great deal of their force and strength.

Let this, then, be your feeling about your life—that when it is assailed by any sin, that sin is not something isolated or insignificant; it is not something which may be indulged or accepted, as if it had no relation with other sins; it is a part of an infinite brood of evil; and that if you admit it within the circle of your life, or tolerate it in the air you breathe, you never know where its pestilent germs may fall, and breed, and multiply, and what mischief may come of it.

It is this feeling of the mysterious vitality of sin, and the subtle kinship of one form of sin with other forms, and its destructiveness when it seizes on a life or poisons an atmosphere, that helps us more than anything else to feel the force and the intensity of the Saviour's prayer for us: "Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me. I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from evil." It is this same feeling of the spreading, insidious, infectious and destructive nature of sin that makes us echo this as our first and most earnest prayer for all we love, that God may keep them from evil; and it is this that makes us value so highly and recognise with thankful hearts every example of a pure and strong life, which gives inspiration and strength to those around it.



XVI. SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS.

"As it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear."—ROMANS xi. 8.

"Blindness in part is happened to Israel."—ROMANS xi. 25.

It is a sad and painful reflection, and one which is continually forced upon us as we read the New Testament, that the long training and preparation of the Jews brought them at the last not to the acceptance but to the rejection of Jesus.

They had been taught, generation after generation, that they were the called and chosen people of God. Psalmists and prophets had enriched their life with the outpouring of their moral and spiritual revelations, and fired their hopes with promises. They lived in the expectation of the Messiah who was to complete these revelations of the God who had led them and taught them ever since the days of their Egyptian bondage.

Yet, when this crowning revelation came to them, they could not even recognise it. The Son of God "came unto His own and His own received Him not." As St. Paul expresses it in my text, while grieving for them with all the intensity of his fervid affection, their life was overgrown with a sort of spiritual dulness. They were suffering from a sort of ossification of the spirit, so that the last and greatest revelation of God could make no impression upon them.

But this picture of the Jews rejecting and crucifying their Saviour, and unable to appreciate or to receive the gift of new life which was offered to them, blind to its beauty, unattracted by its charm, is not only one of the saddest sights in history, it is very instructive for every one of us, because it is charged with warnings that are never out of date. For there is no individual life, and no society, that is not liable to drift into a similar dulness of vision, and so to reject or disregard what God gives for its enlightenment. The great critical events in the world's history, the events that make epochs in the consciousness of men, are not different in kind from those of our own obscure lives. They are, as it were, our own familiar experience, written prophetically and written large.

So the blindness that happened to Israel, and arrested their spiritual growth, may be happening no less to any of us. As God gave them the spirit of slumber, so it may be with our lives.

And the very thought of our possible risks in this respect is valuable to us.

To be conscious that in regard to any of the higher and better things of life our eyes may possibly be growing dim, and our ears dull of hearing, and that God may be pressing upon us gifts of great price which we are too dull to see or to accept—if our soul is sufficiently awake to feel this, then the very feeling may of itself be the germ of new life in us.

And it is very certain, on the other hand, that if we are altogether without any such feelings there is a risk, which even amounts to a probability, that the hardening or deadening influences of custom and tradition will sooner or later degrade our life. And if it should be asked,—How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulness of spirit and of general habit?—we have to reply that it is because of the sensitiveness of the human soul to surrounding influences.

It is because our souls are so receptive, so imitative, and in consequence so easily perverted, darkened, blinded, or misled. I suppose we are all of us conscious of this sensitiveness of the moral and spiritual nature; we should all say, if questioned, that we are quite aware of it, and that no one would dispute it. The soul of every child or man, we should say, is a fine and delicate and sensitive instrument, with the possibilities in it of we know not what Divine harmonies, but easily spoilt.

And yet, when we look at all the common and traditional ordering of daily life, whether in our educating of the young or in the influences that we allow to prevail among young and old, it would seem sometimes as if this thought of the soul's sensitiveness had never dawned upon us. When we once really grasp this thought, or, let us rather say, when this thought has once really fastened upon our mind, and fixed itself there, so that it remains with us, and goes about with us; and when, in consequence, we come to feel how easily any soul may be perverted, or rendered hard or dull; in one word, how easily it may be degraded; then it follows that we look with new eyes on many things, many customs, many influences which the unthinking hardly notice, or notice only to misjudge.

In the light of this feeling of the soul's sensitiveness, the thoughtful man is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of little moment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye of the soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, in consequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spurious consecration, or the world in its blindness may have come to honour them, they are in fact laden with mischief to the general life.

It was the thought of this sensitiveness of the soul to external influences, and of the ease with which any bad influence, or bad custom or practice or fashion, perverts common lives, and of the untold mischief which is consequently latent in it, that winged the words of a well-known writer when she protested, some years ago, against what she designated as debasing the moral currency.

That writer was thinking primarily of vulgar jesting on great subjects, which should stir us to admiration and reverence, and so debasing men's tastes. She had in her mind the class of persons who have the art of spoiling things that are noble or beautiful by their vulgar handling of them; and of the mischief which is done by such persons to public taste and tone and character.

But we may widen the reference. Whosoever, in anything that concerns the conduct of life, spreads low notions, or drags down men's opinion or taste, thus helping to pervert ordinary minds from those higher aims and motives and those reverent views of character and life which should be cherished for our common use and service, is debasing the moral currency.

Here, then, we have a very practical question for our consideration and answering. "Is there anything in my life"—so the question comes to us in our self-examination—"which could be so described? any influence, spreading from my conduct, of which men might truly say that it also is helping to debase the moral currency? Is there to be seen in it anything that tends towards the lowering of common standards? any misuse of things sacred or holy? any foolish or vulgar estimate of the higher things of life?" And if we are in any doubt how to put these questions in a concrete and practical shape, we have only to remember how any one who helps to lower any standard of taste or conduct is debasing the moral currency of life; how, for instance, all those are debasing it who substitute any wrong notion of honour for right notions of honour, or who put roughness and coarseness in place of manliness, or who set the fashion of cynical judgments on good and bad characters.

Or we might take an illustration from what is, unhappily, a very common element in English life: the habit of gambling sport. Wherever this habit spreads, in any class of society, from the highest to the lowest, its effect is invariable; it undermines integrity, it hardens the heart and debases taste, and is the willing handmaid of other vices. Moral degradation is its inseparable companion. Therefore, if you mix in it, or share in it, or give any adhesion or countenance to it, which helps, as men say, to make it respectable, and so to spread its influence, you are debasing the moral currency.

Or take another common case. You are familiar with the poet's description, "And thus he bore without abuse the grand old name of gentleman." That is a noble thing for any man or boy to have said of him; and there is not one among you who does not desire always to be able to claim that name as his own.

But, wherever we go in the world, how many men there are who claim it and yet debase it by ignoble use! They help to spread the notion that a man may be a man of low morality and still a gentleman; that his gentlemanliness may be a mere varnish of culture and manners, a thin veneering having underneath it only meanness, or coarseness, or corruption; and that, notwithstanding this, he may still claim to be called a gentleman. Those who spread such doctrines are debasing the moral currency of English life. And it should be the mission of schools like this, and of those who grow up in them, to pour upon all such persons the contempt which they deserve, and to restore the currency of common life to something of Christian purity.

Remembering, then, how sensitive the soul is, and how easily by example, or conduct, or fashion it may be so perverted as to lose its clear vision and higher aims, its pure tastes and ennobling emotions, we have to make it our ambition and endeavour that our life may be kept free from such debasement.

But, if we are to succeed in this, we must make it our daily prayer that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ will enlighten the eyes of our understanding, and give unto us the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge and love of Him.



XVII. A NEW HEART.

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you."—EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26.

In the beautiful and suggestive dream of Solomon, which is recorded in the third chapter of the First Book of Kings, God appears to him, saying, "Ask what I shall give thee"; and Solomon's answer is, "O Lord, I am but a child set over this great people, give me, I pray Thee, a hearing heart." And God said to him, "Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life, nor riches; behold, I have done according to thy words. I have given thee a wise and understanding heart, and I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honour." And the record of this vision was clearly meant to indicate that the supreme gift of the wisest of men was the hearing or understanding heart. On the other hand, there is nothing against which our Lord in the Gospels utters stronger warnings than that dulness or deadness of spirit which is described as having eyes that see not, and ears that are dull of hearing, and hearts that do not understand. And in illustration of this we read how, while the crowds throng or press upon Jesus, it is the stricken woman who, with soul sensitive to His influence, feels the virtue come out of Him though she only touches the hem of His garment.

Thus we are warned to beware lest that should come upon us which was the ruin of the Jews, dulness or deadness of spiritual faculty; and we are exhorted to pray for and to cherish the hearing heart, the soul that sees and feels spiritual influences, and is sensitive to every high call. And if your soul is thus open and receptive, it is marvellous how full the world becomes to you of Divine voices. They come upon you unexpected, unsought, sending through your heart some illuminating flash of surprise, so that you wonder at your previous dulness; they strike you with the sudden shock of some new knowledge or insight, and make you feel, as never before, the true nature of your daily conduct or your duty and your relation to other men; or they come as the unresting presence of some new thought, which, once roused, haunts and troubles you with questions which you cannot answer, or feelings which you cannot get rid of.

When the soul is roused in this way we see and feel the hatefulness of any sin that may have tempted or beset us; or we contrast our own life with that of those whose lot is so much harder than ours, and we are struck with shame at our selfishness, or waste, or our indifference to the privation, and sin, and suffering that are all around us in the world.

Or sometimes these Divine voices in our ears bring it home to us how much we are losing out of our life's higher possibilities, if from sinful or selfish habit, from dulness of spirit or lack of sympathy, we cut ourselves off in thought and feeling and interest from the great needs, the great sorrows, the great pulsations of the larger world.

But why, you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social and religious interests and enthusiasms.

These calls that come to you, whether invited or not, and that stir your heart, speaking to you out of the multitudinous life of the time you live in, are like the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem, which never hold their peace day nor night.

This ferment of higher life within us and around us, these voices of the Spirit in us, as it struggles to lift us out of the region of fleshly influences, is renewed in every generation and in every single life. If you hear no such voices, if the phenomena of life make no such impression upon you, if you are deaf to all these calls, and care for none of these things, then it is clear that your soul is not yet awake in you; you are living with a dull or darkened heart. It is a sort of cave life, or subterranean life, you lead in such a case, a life of lower rank and lesser hopes.

Yet these voices from above, that come as the witness of the Divine Spirit with our spirit that we are the children of God, never fail us. They do not belong only to times far off. We are not to think of them merely as enshrined in the Bible and peculiar to it; but as living voices that are speaking to us to-day out of the depths of the Divine life, in which our life is sustained.

But we have always to bear this in mind, that the Divine voices speak to men with most stirring effect in every generation when they speak to them through the pressing needs of their own day. To the Jews the voice of God came in the inspired language of their deliverers and prophets—in their unceasing warnings, and their impassioned appeals, and their revelations of new truth. To the first generation of Christians these same voices came in the shape of strong Advent hopes. Many things contributed to lift the Apostles and their followers nearer to God than men of ordinary times. They had seen the Lord; they had lived in His presence; they had gone through much tribulation; the tongue of fire had rested on them; the Spirit had taken full possession of them; but we cannot read the New Testament without feeling that the most stirring, the most regenerative influence in their society was the vividness and intensity of their Advent hope. Their expectation of the Lord's return lifted them out of the temptations of the world and above the trials of it. It took hold of their active powers, and made them new men.

Their Advent expectation was not the vague, half mystic, half sentimental movement of the heart, which just touches the lives of so many Christians during our Advent seasons, while it does not really alter any of their earthly concerns.

Christ was very near to the Apostolic Christians. As the eastern sky brightened every morning they felt that it might be the light of His coming; they thought of Him as only hidden from them by the neighbouring cloud. They looked for Him to return at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the noonday, and none could say how soon. And so it came to pass that this expectation made those first believers, those humble followers of Christ, those Galilean fishermen, those obscure provincials, instinct with that great life which lifts men above the world, and constitutes them a new power in it.

Our lives are largely influenced by the thought of slow development; but we miss a great deal of the secret of all higher life if we forget this wonderful exaltation of the poor and ignorant and obscure by this gift of the Spirit and the inspiration of Divine hope. It was not by any method which we could have forecast that those men found out this charm which takes the heart captive and regenerates the life. In their presence we feel the force of the prophet's words, "Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the Lord."

But then there rises the question, How are these Divine influences to become powerful in us also?

On the one hand, we are conscious that as we live involved or entangled in the worldly life, or in any form of external life around us, the spiritual part of us slumbers or is overlaid. It loses its practical power over our thought, our feeling, and our conduct—our lamp goes out. Whilst on the other hand we are conscious that the special form of Advent expectation which inspired and possessed the first generation of Christians is gone from us past recovery. We see clearly enough as we read the New Testament what that first generation expected, and how the expectation transformed their lives; but we see also that they were mistaken in their hope, and that God's providential plan proved to be far greater than their human conception of it. What, then, are our Advent hopes?

There are two things which we should keep clear in our minds concerning them. One, that they must be based upon our feeling of the living influence of Christ and the working of the Holy Spirit; and the other is that the voices of the Spirit must come to us out of the needs of our own life and of the time we live in if they are to lead us to practical issues. When we look out upon the world and its life we feel that Advent hopes must take some new form if they are to preserve reality and to be fulfilled.

We see decaying faith in some quarters, and selfishness growing where faith decays; we see ignorance and want and all their crop of sin and misery deep-rooted in the life of every city; and the prospect which these things suggest, the problems that meet us as we think of them, might well fill us with misgiving. And they would indeed do so were it not for the fact that the revelation of such things brings with it another revelation also; it seizes on men's souls and stirs them as with a Divine summons. And thus we have these hopeful signs for the future rising around us, even where things look darkest, that the great problems of humanity are felt in our day to be above all things its social and religious problems. And seeing that the aspirations of the time—the feelings, the purposes, the aims, and hopes that lift men—grow out of the needs of the time and the problems of its life, we look forward—we have good ground for looking forward—to a generation of men who shall be distinguished by religious earnestness and by social enthusiasm.

But if this be so, what will your share be in this coming life? The Spirit of God, as we now understand it, comes to us with calls of this kind.

If you would hasten the Advent of Christ in your own soul and in the souls of others, you must discard selfishness, you must rise above self- indulgence, you must prepare to merge yourself in the social life, for the social good; seeing that the growth of this good is the only sure and certain sign of the coming of the Lord. So, then, the Angel of the Advent is thus calling us. The future before you is big with social and religious issues, and the Spirit of Christ is brooding over it, and you and such as you are to be His chosen instruments in helping forward these issues.



XVIII. SPIRITUAL POWER.

"And behold I send the promise of My Father upon you; but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high."—ST. LUKE xxiv. 49.

"Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you."—ACTS i. 8.

To-day we are celebrating the last of the series of historical festivals which mark the springtime of our Christian year. And without this one the rest would leave us with a sense of incompleteness; for we should be without its gift of the abiding and indwelling Spirit, and the fulfilment of the last promise.

What, then, are we learning of its practical lessons, and gathering into our life? We have read the Pentecostal narrative, and others that illustrate it. We have sung Pentecostal hymns. We have joined in special prayer for the light of the Holy Spirit to shine in our hearts, giving us a right judgment; and if we are led to ask, "To what purpose is all this?" the answer is to be seen in the texts I have just read to you, the burden of which is the gift of power from on high. Do we not recognise this as the end of the New Testament revelation? And do we not acknowledge that this revelation fails, so far as we are concerned, if it gives us no such power? It is, indeed, in considering this power of the Spirit that we touch to the quick the real influence of religion in the practical life of men; for experience shows that it is possible for a man to be endowed with almost every other gift and yet to lack this one—this indwelling gift of the Holy Ghost the Comforter.

Our life is filled with almost everything we could ask or require to enlighten us or to guide and direct, and yet it fails sometimes.

It may be failing in some of us here to-day, just from want of this Divine spark, this influence of a Spirit from above taking up His abode in us, burning and shining in our hearts so as to purge our affections from sinful taint and purify our tastes, lifting up and enlarging our capacities, and rousing our energies—in one word, fusing all our life into a new form with its refining power.

And the question of all questions for each of us to consider is, "How am I to make my life the home and embodiment of this power from above?" If we turn to our Lord's own example, or to the life of Paul or any other of His followers, or to any life we have known and felt to breathe around it this same power of the Spirit, some things become at once very obvious and clear to us.

That supreme example and those lives declare that whoever desires to have his soul purified and invigorated, to be charged with this Divine electric influence, must have something of separateness and independence in his life; he must feel himself as not merely one of a crowd moved by the desires, aims, hopes, tastes, and ambitions which may chance to prevail around him, but as a separate soul in direct communion with the Spirit of God.

But if we are to realise this in our own life, it means that our times of daily prayer, whether in private or in public, are times at which we lay open our secret life to the Divine presence and influence; it means that we give some real thought and meditation to this presence of God in our life, and that we thus feed our souls continually on wholesome spiritual food. It is in this way that men's lives become in a real sense the temples of the Holy Spirit, and the influences of sin fall away from them.

But the hindrances that are always acting to undermine or destroy any such spiritual power in us are manifold, and seldom far away from our life.

The world outside is always with us and acting in this way, distracting thought, setting up its own standards, drawing us into its channels, and deadening the Spirit in us. This is one of the inevitable conditions of life as you will have to live it, and the man who is in earnest recognises it as a paramount reason why he should never drop out of his personal practice the habit of separate prayer and communion with God. Or again, we may, and often do, let these hindrances grow up within us through our own fault, and quite apart from any active influences of the outer world.

We contract a dulness of spirit, so that spiritual things have no interest and faith has no living power in the heart; and all this very often not because any person, or anything outside of us, can be said to have led us away and entangled us, but simply because we have taken no pains to keep our life within the range of spiritual influences; we have let prayer slip out of it; we have lived in no spiritual companionship; we have done nothing to keep our soul alive in us. This is how men choose the lower life, and surrender their birthright out of pure inertia, so that they lose their spiritual capacity.