hast given me, be with me where I am: that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." That will also was founding "a world."

"Jesus saith, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.”—JOHN XIV. 6,7. "These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace."-JOHN XVI. 33.

T has been said already that the right and the

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power of the Lord to speak peace to the human spirit rests on the fact that He alone, of all beings in the wide universe, can make it whole and sound within. Salvation means soundness. A soul united to fear God's name is saved-saved from the only thing which can destroy a soul, inward insurrection and discord; the only pit that can gorge it, inward selfishness and lust. From that deadly strife the

Lord can deliver it; from that horrible pit the Lord can save it. "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

"These things have I spoken unto

you, that in me ye might have peace."

We have spoken of those moments of dread experience when the sense of the utter powerlessness of all good spirits, human and angelic, to help us against ourselves, against the sins and lusts which most easily beset us, bears with oppressive weight upon the spirit. Mother, sister, wife-man's visible guardian angels surely-may agonize in vigilant effort to shield a beloved one from temptation, or to support him against the pressure. Legions of spirits, hosts of influences, may be there assistant, in vain, in vain. They can but watch with streaming eyes as the prodigal breaks away into the wilderness. Will he ever come home again? Is that parting of spirits to be eternal? God knoweth, and God alone. All that is left to us to know is, that there is a region in which every human spirit passes beyond the sight and the touch of every other spirit, and is absolutely, awfully, alone with God. So

dread does this mystery of being, this freedom of a personal will, seem to men, that there are millions. of our fellow-men whose theology regards it with something like horror; their one hope is that they may, no matter at what cost, attain to the renunciation of it, and lose the sense and the burden of personal existence, by reabsorption into the Supreme. This is the fundamental hope of the Buddhist. This is the passionate aspiration of a religion which numbers among its devotees, it is said, onethird of the human race.

Does the Gospel open a new and more blessed prospect? "Miserable man that I am," can the Gospel open to me the hope of deliverance from the evil which is in me, and which threatens to become "me." "I thank my God through Jesus Christ my Lord." "Christ hath delivered me from the bondage of sin and the curse of the law that I might receive the adoption of a son." There lies the whole marrow of the Gospel. "Power to become a son," is what the Lord has brought to man, to me. The Lord is the Redeemer of slaves, that He may give them the right and power to be sons. He is the Healer, the Purifier, the Glorifier of

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