binds up for us the broken links of human brotherhood. As we in act strive to see for His sake, a neighbour in a wounded Samaritan, He opens our eyes and we do see. As we, in the daily events of life, strive to remind ourselves that all around us are His redeemed; that we may not use our friends, our children, our servants, our dependants, for our own selfish pleasure, but live with them as brethren in the Lord, He helps us to see and feel the value of the souls around us, containing, as each one does within itself, that which shall unfold into an eternity; and bought, as each one is, at no less a price than His own blood. It is thus, that He, to whom we have committed the keeping of our souls works in us, and with us, for our sanctification. He melts our hearts by a sight of His love, and so He draws up into a purer air and higher exercise the very natural instincts with which He has furnished our hearts. That pity and compassion, which, if it were exercised only for the sake of the pleasure attendant upon gratifying its own impulses, would still be of the earth, earthy, and might even strengthen in us a more refined selfishness, becomes, when it is truly exercised for His sake, who died for us, so dwelt in, by the light of His love, that it is transformed into a heavenly temper, and an affection ripening us for the inheritance of the saints in light. So will He, if we will but bear to Him in active faith the burden of our indwelling corruption, most truly set us free from it, and change us even here

into His own image. For this then, let us pray and watch, that if God has given us all outer things, we may yet, by sitting loose to them, through a secret discipline of self denial, and a growing love to Him, escape even the great temptation of abundance; and if God has given us little, be saved from so setting our heart upon that little, that, through the power of selfishness, we lose sight both of our neighbour and of our God.

My brethren, let us make this truth our own this day. You are asked to see your brethren, to see those for whom Christ died, in the dwellers in this hamlet for which we desire to provide the unspeakable blessing of a settled ministry of Christ's gospel. In the state of this hamlet, there are many points of likeness to that of the wounded traveller, whom our Lord pourtrayed to wake up the slumbering conscience of his self sufficient questioner. There is perhaps no part of our whole population which has been more "passed by" by priest and levite than these outlying scattered portions of our agricultural population. God forbid that we should undervalue the wants of the multitudes who are gathered into the seething masses of ignorance, misery, and sin, which form our great town populations. But these have at least attracted much Christian notice. Our hamlets are too often passed by. Yet there they lie upon one highway side; despoiled and sorely wounded. No one who has not for himself

examined it, yea and that closely, can know the greatness of this evil. We are deceived by misty undefined notions about the innocence of rural shades and a country population. There canot be a greater error. Man is man everywhere: and man without Christ's Gospel is everywhere corrupting and corrupt. Such a population, as truly as our towns, has its own peculiar forms of evil, A hard crust of dullness oppresses those who are thus shut out from the sight and sound and neighbourhood of intellectual exertion, and benumbs the higher faculties of their souls; whilst under it a gross animal sensuality of uncleanness and drunkenness too often reigns unrebuked by better examples and unrelieved by higher aspirations. There is, moreover, this special reason for helping such places; they are yet within the reach of real and effective help. Place a resident Minister of Christ, who shall live and speak, and pray, and minister in Christ's strength amongst them, and, if God prolongs your life even a few years, you may live to see this thorny wilderness blossom as a rose. For such a population you are asked to give to-day. For one near to you, near to all the opportunities of Christian life, and yet to a peculiar degree ex.cluded from them; to one which has suffered greatly from its nearness to this place; which has been in very truth one of the dark corners where our sins have established themselves and taken root to curse all around them. Perhaps I speak to

some who have themselves added to this evil, surely I speak to those who belong to a body which is chargeable with this guilt. Do something I beseech you, to-day, to roll back these streams of evil. Let the light of Christ's Church shine into that darkness. Let not another generation pass away under these unhappy circumstances. Time is passing; eternity close before many of them; the night coming when you cannot work. Oh snatch them before it is too late from such a ruin. Own those outcasts as the brother robbed, naked, and wounded, to whom you, for Christ's sake, will minister; look up at His cross, look in at your own selfish heart. Pray Him to cleanse and heal it; and then in His strength set at once this day with self-denial and real sacrifice about this work of most necessary mercy, and He of His exceeding goodness will accept as done unto Himself that which for His sake you have done unto your brethren.