mental, or decorative; it will do away with all our intellectual contributions and displays of patronage in reference to the Cross. The Cross does not want your intellectual homage; the Cross says, with heartbroken pathos, Stand out of the way, that guilty selfcondemned sinners may see me. No sooner does the Cross become intellectualised than it breeds infidels by the thousand. The Cross is God's heart. O man, veil thy reason, and make it bend with thee in lowliest reverence and worship; then when it speaks it will speak with finer eloquence, with nobler strength, its self-distrust will be the first element of its majesty and usefulness.

What does this revelation do, in the second place? It vindicates God from the charge of delighting in animal sacrifices. Will the Lord be pleased with burnt offerings and calves of a year old? or will he be pleased with thousands of rams? Does he love to see the smoking hecatomb? No; when he has required blood of a merely animal kind it has always been symbolically, typically, or prefigurately; it was a necessary part of the alphabet of spiritual history. He must begin his lessons where the scholar can begin. He began his account of creation where the babies of the world could begin. If he had told us about fire-mist and protoplasm, he would have defeated his own object, and there would have been no Bible thousands of years ago; so he just set up the heavens and the earth as we could understand them in some little degree, and he said, It is better they should begin where they can rather than not begin at all, and as they go through the ages they will be able to understand figure and type and parable and dream, and find in colour and in music the truest, widest, grandest facts. The Lord is not pleased with the blood of calves and of rams. He turned from it; he said, I cannot away with your ceremonies and oblations rendered only by your fancy or by your hand. Everything the Lord did require of a physical and external kind was only in a temporary sense, the whole thought of God leading up to spirituality. "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

What does this answer do, in the third place? It destroys the

notion of piety by proxy:-"Shall I give my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" We are always willing to make away with other people; we are exceedingly liberal with the lives of others. We philosophise and theorise with admirable serenity, as if we had abundance of leisure in which to contemplate the tragedy of mankind, and we say, If a thousand perish, and ten thousand be saved, the gain is on the side of salvation. No! That is false; that is a misuse of the principle of majorities. There ought to be no man lost. And no man will be lost but the son of perdition. If after the Lord has dealt with a man by his providence and by his Spirit, and by all the mystery of the Cross, there is found in that man nothing but devil, he must go to his own place and to his own company. But the Lord will do the handling upon a scale we cannot comprehend, and if the Lord gives up any human soul we may well say sadly, Amen.

Reading this passage, does any man say, Then the way is most easy? Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God-why, here is alphabetic piety. How foolish is such talk! Is it easy to be just? The question is not, Is it easy to be nearly just, almost just—just upon the whole-taking in life as it goes, there is no doubt that on the average there is justice? That is not the inquiry at all. To do justly between man and man, to do justly to thyself-there is an ease that holds in it all the difficulty of the most complete and strenuous discipline, and we never know how difficult such ease is until we try to work it out in detail. What have you done? Hold up your deeds to the sun. Many things look well in artificial light which do not look well in the noonday blaze. Examine your justice in the light of the sun; not in the light of a clouded sun, but when the sun is in its summer fulness, when there is least of cloud about him, when every beam is a dazzling revelation, then hold up your finest morality-and be ashamed of it. Is it natural to be just? Or is it natural for strength to triumph over weakness? Is there not a high and mighty philosophy which says, The weakest must go to the wall; if there is any survival it must be the survival of the fittest; we cannot stop the progress of the world in order to accommodate ourselves to the weakness of imbeciles; we make

an offer, we make it in haste; we say, Take it or leave it, and the answer must be given before the clock strikes the next hour? Is that justice? Are there no slow-moving minds? Are there not some minds that do not know themselves, and that require not to be despised, but to be sustained? Is there not a justice that sits down beside ignorance, and says, You do not know all the case; I will show you what you ought to be and to do and to ask? What, is a man to be both buyer and seller in one? Yes, O thou proud, sharp-dealing, clever thief-yes! That would put an end to business. So much the better. We have had "business" enough; we want now a little justice and commonwealth and brotherhood and sympathy. That would take away the crown from some men. Better be without it. They are not kings, they are clowns. Let the crown go, and then they will begin to see themselves as they are. But some men are nothing but sharpness; then let them play their sharpness upon themselves. They have no right in the sanctuary; in the sanctuary justice sits down beside ignorance, and helps ignorance to make the best of its little possession. Is it natural to be merciful? Who does not like to assert his mastery? Mercy stops that it may do good; mercy says, Have you had enough, or could you take more? Do you require a softer pillow for your aching head? Shall I stay with you all night until the morning come? then your other friends will gather around you. Mercy has no clock; mercy has no scales by which to mete out the exact pound; mercy is the other name of love— mercy is love in tears, mercy is pity that cannot speak because of the sob of its sympathetic grief.

"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"-not intellectually, not as who should say, We understand the mysteries of providence, and if you do not, well, what can ignorance expect? The greatest Christian should be the humblest. There need be no difficulty in going before a great man. «Take those children away," said the disciples: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not," was the word of the Master. There is no difficulty with the Master. You insist upon seeing the Master himself. If you see the little priest at

the door he will forbid you, and drive you away; go right past him, and ask for the Master. You will have no difficulty with Jesus. Simon said, This man is not a prophet; if he were a prophet he would know who, and what manner of woman this is, for she is a sinner. And Jesus said, "She hath loved much, and her sins are all forgiven her." The multitude murmured that he is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner; and Jesus said, He also little rich Zacchaeus-hath a heart, he also is a son of Abraham. You have never seen the Master perhaps. You have seen the minister, the ecclesiastic, the preacher, the priest, the fool who thinks he has the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and he only can open the door into the light. O man, thou couldst see Christ, thou couldst work thy way to the Cross, and if thy faith be small this thou couldst say: I may not speak, to him, or throw my arms around him, or be on reverential familiarity with him; but if I may only touch the hem of his garment, the little craspedon corner, I shall be made whole. That is the mystery. Christ's Godhead is in every word he spake; Christ's deity is in every look he bestows upon man; Christ's eternity is in every tone of his voice. Oh, touch himtouch him somewhere, anywhere, but with the finger of faith, and though thou hast had flux of blood, leprosy, lameness, destitution of soul, whatever be thy complaint, thou shalt be made whole. This is the Gospel. Let us preach it with fearlessness and with tender love.

Chapter vi. 9-15.

THE PERILS OF WEALTH.

EAR ye the rod, and who hath appointed it." Do not be

"H atheistical in the time of affliction. The "rod" means

udgment. Sometimes judgment takes the form of chastening. We are not always to suppose that the rod means mere punishment—an action of the strong upon the weak, or the righteous upon the wicked; the rod may be an instrument of education as well as of vengeance and of penalty. Do not suppose that the devil holds the rod. The devil is the weakest of all creatures : his is only the strength of boisterousness; there is nothing in it of abiding pith, stability, real power. The devil is a chained enemy. Afflictions do not spring out of the dust. When the rod is lacerating your back, ask, What wilt thou have me to do? When all things are dull and distressing and disappointing, say, This is the ministry of God: he is taking out of me some elements of vanity, which are always elements of weakness, and he is conducting me to the altar by a subterranean passage. We do not always go to the altar along pathways of flowers; not always does God beckon us through a garden to follow him to some chosen place of real communion. Sometimes we are driven to the altar; often we do not want to pray: the soul will take no rest, and give none, until a great, sweet, holy, burdened prayer has gone up to heaven by way of the Cross. Is the rod lying heavily upon your house now? Know ye the rod, and him who hath appointed it; examine yourselves carefully and searchingly, and see if there be any wicked way in you, and drag it out, it will rot in the sunlight. If, on the other hand, you can hold by your integrity like the Psalmist of old, if you can wrestle with God as did Jacob, saying, I cannot tell why this has come upon me, the answer will be more abundant than your petition. Magnify the Cross at midnight.