be. From Him come those deep instincts of our moral nature, that, if we give due heed to them, will never betray us into taking wrong for right, being in us, as we believe, the proper marks of our distinctive human character, and claiming for us a close affiance with the divine. For these moral instincts are not, as some pretend, the quaint result of the formation of the brain that one day must decay and perish; but are reflections in us of the truth and righteousness of that great spirit from which our spirits have come forth, for

"Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home."

Now, as you must not separate the thought of duty from the thought of God, so you must be careful that your thought of God is a just thought. How shall you come to just and true thoughts of Him? By cleansing your spirit, as well as you can, from all carnal and worldly stain, and trying to fill it with purity and love, remembering the two deep and wide sayings of the New Testament, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," and "He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is Love."

It has been truly said, "It is the heart that makes the theologian." It is not the trained and practised intellect that will lead to the truest thoughts

of God, but the pure heart and the loving spirit. To these God reveals Himself "as He does not unto the world." Nothing is to be more shunned, as a bar to any real "religious improvement," than the hard and merely intellectual representations of God's character, on which systematic theologians have exercised their ingenuity, and with which they have too long oppressed the spirit and conscience of mankind. Those definitions of the divine person and nature which explain everything from the eternal "decree," in which they recognize no "marvel of the Everlasting Will," along the whole line of recorded revelation to the work of the Atonement, which becomes, under their treatment, a mere legal transaction between the wrathful Father and the interceding Son, degrade our conceptions of the Godhead, strip the relations between God and Christ and man of all their lofty mystery, and bring the manifestation of that love which "passes all understanding" to the bar of mere human law and logic. Nothing is in reality more atheistic, and tends more directly to breed atheism in honest minds, than those rigid and self-confident dogmas, which presume to set a bound about the universal Father's good-will towards His children; which refer all His doings to an absolute and arbitrary will, and not to a righteous law; which, while professing to honour Him, ascribe to Him a less than human mercifulness and a more

than human vengefulness; which invest Him with all the attributes that engender fear, and rob Him of all that call forth faith and love.

No matter with what authority such doctrines may appeal to you, you are bound to believe none of them that contradict the instinct of your own spirit, which will tell you, when you retire from the strife of tongues to commune with its "still small voice," that the great God is your Father; that that sacred relation can never change; and that as high as the heaven is above the earth, so far above all love known to human fatherhood must be the love, with which He loves you in whom you live and move and have your being. Believe none of them that contradict the instinct of your own conscience, which tells you that the Judge of all the earth must do right; and that nothing can by any possibility be righteous or just in God which you feel would be unrighteous and unjust in you.

What is

Thinking, then, lovingly, and because lovingly justly, of God, you must think of duty. duty? I think, as Christ taught His disciples that their "neighbour" was any one to whom they could do a service, we might define our duty to be whatever honest work lies to our hand to do, and especially whatever lies nearest. Among the many lessons which its greatest teacher has taught our generation, this is not the least worthy to be remembered, “Do

the duty which lies nearest to thee, which thou knowest to be a duty. Thy second duty will already have become clearer."

I cannot here go into detail, nor need I, for each conscience must decide for itself which is the right thing to do; each reason must decide for itself which of perhaps many right things is the one supremely right, wise, useful thing, to do at the given time and in the given circumstances. But we ought to note, when we speak of duty or of doing any work, that each bit of work has its two values-its value to the world in which it is done, and its value to him who does it. Its value to others the doer of it is not called to reckon; but its value to himself depends, not on what he does, so much as on how he does it, and what through the doing of it he becomes. We should think of our work, even the humblest, as part of our education for the higher life. And we shall find the work which we regard in this light itself an agent in our religious growth. We cannot seek, in this way, the kingdom of God and His righteousness-we cannot thus acknowledge His moral order, without, as we do so, drawing nearer in spiritual affinity to God Himself.

Try to do what your conscience tells you is the right thing; try to take your stand on the will of God, and to be faithful to what you can learn of it; try to get into the way of realizing that righteousness

rules the universe, and of putting the commandment of God before your own pleasure and profit. Thus, through the avenues of humble and even formal duty, try to ascend to a higher type and character of life; and you shall soon find that help and strength are coming to you, from a loftier region than that in which you hitherto have dwelt. Your spirit will rise into the purer realm of love and light, and will come to understand the principle that the great end of all life, if life is to deserve the name, is not to obtain the fullest abundance of worldly possession-not even to master all human knowledge-not even to render a strict obedience to all divine commands, but to know God and to be like Him. This understanding will not come to you while you walk in the way of the world; it will not come to you while your religion is an affair of ritual, or sentiment, or doctrine, or tradition, as religion too often is,—and thence too certainly degenerating, as may be seen in many a painful example, into the uncharitable disputatiousness of the sectarian on the one hand, and the enervating superstitions of the fanatic on the other.

A human life in constant spiritual communion with the divine, and applying in all the duties of its daily intercourse with men the principles imparted to it from on high,-that is the ideal of the life that we should lead.

But the high ideal is prone to mock our mortal

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