would have come he would have watched and not have suffered his house to be broken into." It is by doing the will of God; by recognizing it in all the changes of life; by reading in the course of this troubled world the expression of the Divine mind; by bowing ourselves down before it, under whatsoever guise it may reveal itself; by yielding ourselves in gladness of mind both to do and suffer it, counting it a holy discipline, and a loving correction of our own wilfulness, and by praying Him never to stay His hand till the mind of self be abolished from our regenerate being; by these means it is thus we are changed from the shadow of a fleeting life to the abiding realities of the eternal world, being made partakers of the will of God.

I love to kiss each print, where Thou-
Hast set Thine unseen feet,

I cannot fear Thee, blessed will,
Thine empire is so sweet.

When obstacles and trials seem

Like prison walls to be,

I do the little I can do,

And leave the rest to Thee.

He always wins who sides with God;
To him no chance is lost,

God's will is sweetest to him when
It triumphs at his cost.

All that He blesses is our good,

And unblest good is ill;

And all is right that seems most wrong
If it be His sweet will.

We seem to want in these days a more frequent setting forth of His life as our childhood's pattern, and a looking to that as the groundwork of Christian teaching for our children submission. There is a very general restlessness and dislike to be guided among the young, and a correspond ing shrinking, as if it were an imposing of a new yoke, on one part of the elders from enforcing, as a first principle, obedience. All training is useless without this, and all knowledge only the strengthening the power of deception in that heart, which is naturally deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And it will be found when we have reared a people freed from catechisms, and commandments, and Church teaching, and in their place filled their minds with the science and the discoveries of modern days, we shall have let loose a tide of cultivated heathenism, which no earthly power can control. The subject before us, in its history and bearing on Christian life, and in its effects, where observed or despised, will illustrate this and prove how great a necessity for the moral and social good of society, and for the

peace and comfort of home is the law of
obedience, the rule of life contained in the
ten commandments. Christ the perfect
man overcame sin by His holiness; by His
perfect and perpetual obedience; by His
spotless life, by His submissive will; and
only by imitating Him can we hope to do
the same.
He offered Himself without spot

to God, a sinless offering; the reasonable
sacrifice and the spiritual sacrifice of a
"crucified will." It is ours so far as
we can to do the same. In His childhood,
in His youth, in His manhood, in all the
acts and all the sufferings of His humanity,
in all that He did for sinners, and all that
He suffered for them, in His loneliness and
nights of prayer, as well as in the com-
pany of the worldling and the sinner; in
His fulfilment of all righteousness, His
worship and His acquiescence in the au-
thority of the powers of the world, He was
mastering sin by showing a perfect obedi.
ence. He worked out for us as none other
could the rule of life, He taught us how
life should be passed, how its cares should
be met, how its temptations should be over-
come, how its callings should be fulfilled,
how the balance of its social order should
be preserved, in a word, how to live in the
world and above it, by doing the will of
God.

Let us pray Him therefore to shed abroad

in us the mind that was in Christ; that, our will being crucified, we may offer up ourselves to be disposed of as He sees best, whether for joy or sorrow, blessing or chastisement; to be high or low; to be slighted, or esteemed; to be full, or to suffer need; to have many friends, or to dwell in a lonely home; to be passed by, or called to serve Him and His Kingdom in our own land or among people of a strange tongue; to be, to go, to do, to suffer, even as He wills, even as He ordains, even as Christ endured, "who through the eternal spirit, offered Himself without spot to God.'

The ten commandments bring home to us the two very opposite mysteries, the mystery of sin, and the mystery of holiness. We learn from them what sin is, what it has been to the world and how it has transformed human life; we learn also how the evil thus created may be remedied, how mercy and truth have come by Jesus Christ.

In studying the rule of life we must be careful to keep in view the indentity be tween the unwritten and the written Law of God. We must not look on the written Law as some new revelation, or God as otherwise in Will and decree than one. The mischief of separating the Will of God leads obviously to the mischief of separating the responsibility of man. Faith

and duty are thus confused, and it is found that some will act as though they supposed, and doubtless they do suppose, that we gain admittance into Heaven on easier terms by Christ instead of seeing that obedience which was an eternal law makes us know and believe in Christ, that the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. The result of this is the theory of "Believeonly" amounting indeed to an almost entire neglect of duty and a virtual denial of human responsibility altogether. How much good an honest self-examination by the Law of God would do to many, who esteem themselves as advanced in spiritual life because they can readily use the shibboleth of" spiritual talk, it is needless to say. Nothing tends more surely to the practice of humility than the strict watch over our obedience, nothing more certainly destroys sentiment nor gives us such real and true view of the Holiness of God, and the solemn nature of human life, than to study God through His revealed Law. "Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments," and "He that hath my command. ments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me, and he that loveth Me, shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him."

The written law, as laid down to us in the ten commandments, carries us back to