God in prayer, and in all your direct religious exercises, you have all the wandering thoughts of children, all their indistinct or mean conceptions of the majesty of him whom you are addressing; and never learn in manly faith to give up your hearts to him, while you strive earnestly, with all your best and highest powers, to know him and to learn his will. This is to be childish and unchristian.

One sentence, in conclusion, will help you directly to apply the text "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of God." If you think highly of yourselves, you have not the child-like mind which Christ loves. If you are thinking highly of yourselves, you may soon learn that this evil is at work by your overbearing, disrespectful thoughts of those around you, if not by the words which you address to them. If you are self-willed, you are not docile, and therefore not child-like. And above all, you are not child-like, if you do not continually feel your need of turning to the Lord Jesus Christ for help in all difficulties, and are not willing implicitly to trust him. This is, indeed, the real essence of religion, to feel towards God in Christ as children to a father. We cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven without this child-like love and trust.

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT.

[HARE.]

The whole race of the children of Adam are like their first father in this, that they think they shall gain the living objects of their aim, by making use of the creature according to their own will, not according to the will of God. Satan is evermore whispering and muttering to us, that we shall never become wise by merely walking in the path of duty,

and seeking the knowledge of good, without the knowledge of evil; that we shall never become rich by self-denial and contentment; that we shall never become powerful by meekness and patience; that we shall never become glorious by humility and submission. "No," he says; "if you want to be rich, and powerful, and glorious, you must sweep together as much as you can of the precious things of this world. You must get lands; you must get houses; you must get flocks and herds; you must get gold and silver— much—much—all that you can—the more the better. Then you will indeed be rich; then you will have power over your neighbours; then you will be glorious in the eyes of the world." He says this in one way or other to us all; and we all believe him. What is this but seeking the living among the dead? It was thus that Adam gave up his heart to the creature; and thus all his children have done ever since.

You may tell me, indeed, that you have never indulged in such high thoughts; that you have never dreamed of seeking riches, or power, or glory, and that, therefore, you must be innocent of this sin of seeking the living among the dead. But the sin I am speaking of is not one of more or less. It is one of kind, not of degree. A fly may be over-greedy, as well as a crocodile or a leviathan. Adam's sin did not lie in his seeking to conquer a large empire, or to fill his treasury with the gold of Ophir. A single apple was enough to draw away his heart from God; and in giving up his heart to that apple, instead of to God, he sinned. In like manner, you, my brethren, who are set upon the carth as Adam was in the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it, if you were tɔ fulfil this your task in simple humble obedience to God, with your hearts fixed upon doing the will of God, and not your own will, upon showing forth the glory of God, and not, as they are mainly, upon gaining what you can for yourselves, you would not sin. Er because God is not in all your

thoughts; because you let the thoughts of this world, and the cares of this world, and the desires of this world, drive the thought of God out of your hearts, therefore you sin, like Adam, and all the rest of his children, in seeking the living among the dead.

For although the things of this world, as being God's creatures, have all a certain kind of life in them, when they are regarded in connection with God, as his creatures, or as his gifts; and although, when so regarded, they may be made to minister to living purposes, the moment they are severed from God, that life passes away from them. They become the children of death, and they carry the taint of death along with them, whithersoever they go. Instead of satisfying our desires, they increase our cravings. The more we feed on them, the hungrier and thirstier they make us, with a hunger and thirst that shall never be filled. They abide not with us. Even while they do, they change their features, and lose their charms, and fade, and anon they make themselves wings and flee away. Or at all events death snatches them from us, and us from them, and, however rich, and powerful, and glorious we may have been, after the fashion of this world, casts us down into a pit of poverty, and weakness, and shame. Even though we should contrive to bury ourselves alive, in a grave walled with solid gold, the time will come when we must sink out of this grave into one of common earth-the time when we shall find that the worms are no respecters of persons.

Therefore, because we are so prone to seek the living among the dead, greatly do we need that the angels should call on us to seek the living among the living. Because, when left to ourselves, we set all our affections on things on the earth, we need to be exhorted continually to set them on things above. Say not that you dare not; say not that you cannot. If Christ had not risen from the dead, then in

deed there would have been no hope for us. We should have been utterly unable to seek living things in the realm of life; our hearts must have gone on burrowing in death, until we sank into it. But now, seeing that Christ is risen out of the bonds of death, and has taken his seat in heavenly places at the right hand of God, we too may lift up our hearts to him, and following him into heavenly places, may seek the living among the living.

DIFFUSIVE CHRISTIANITY.

[WHEWELL.]

In every corner, in every form, in endless usages, in unmarked influences, in weekly ministrations, in daily offers of comfort, in ties that bind the highest and the lowest, the present instant and the remote past, we enjoy the benefits conferred by those who, being themselves provoked to love and good works by their Christian teachers, sought to secure a perpetual succession of such teaching, by which they, through all succeeding time, might also provoke to love and good works the generations which should come after them.

And this has been done at every period. From the ages which we often especially designate by speaking of their darkness, has this light especially shined upon us. From the times of national tumult, and war, and bloodshed, thus issues to us, out of many a sacred recess, the message of the Gospel of peace. And, blessed be God! the stock of men thus filled with a truly Christian spirit of care for their brethren has never failed or intermitted. There have been, even down to our own time, many men zealous of such good works. There have been, from the time of the apostles, we trust even to our own time, men who have acted upon the con

viction of that which we have tried to express-that Christians are a sacred company, a band dedicated to the service of God, whose business it is to spread the knowledge of God upon the earth; to turn men from the power of Satan to the power of God; to draw them from that untamed mood of men, in which lusts and angers place them in turmoil and variance, to the love of each other, to the thought of God, to the love of Christ, to the influence of his Spirit, to the imitation of his character. Christians are a holy priesthood set apart for this ministration; a universal church, everywhere earnestly endeavouring to draw men into its fold; a perpetual body of missionaries, in every country labouring among unbelievers, but always trusting that they shall turn some from their unbelief. They are, in all ages, and in every society, as their Divine Head and Founder at first described them, the leaven which is to go on leavening the lump, till the whole be leavened; the tree which is to grow, till its branches spread over the whole face of the earth. And in fulfilling this their office, they will, if they are truly Christians, reckon no exertion, no privation, no sacrifice, too great. They are debtors to all men in virtue of their debt to Christ, and can never pay more than they owc. They have received vast benefits from the Christian benefactors of distant lands and past ages; they are bound to repay them to the men of their own time, and their own land, first; and then to the children of distant regions, and the sons of future ages. They have received a message full of grace and love, and must overflow with it, so that it may flow on to other men. They have been touched with fire from heaven, and must be a burning and a shining light upon earth. They have received the spirit of adoption by which they cry, Abba, Father, and are bound, like their Great Teacher, to do their Father's business.

Such considerations as these are often put forward when