PRAYER.

ALMIGHTY GOD, we bring our tribute of praise unto thee, small and unworthy; but thou dost not despise that which is little and insignificant, thou dost even choose the things that are not to bring to naught things that are; thou dost turn our gift of water into a gift of wine, and our two small mites which make a farthing thou dost look into gold. We therefore come to thee with such as we have; we give thee our hearts, our minds, the whole affection and the whole loyalty of which thou hast made us capable. We would keep back no part of the price; we would be thine altogether,our judgment, our fancy, our will, our love, and every energy of our nature. Help us to give thee the entire sacrifice, withholding nothing, a holy offering unto the Lord. Thou hast made us what we are-wonders to ourselves, mysteries that have no answer in time; thou hast given us desires after immortality, longings and stirrings which cannot be explained in mortal tones, so that though we do ourselves injury and seek to grieve and quench thy Spirit, yet behold thy Spirit is here, a continual protest, and a continual promise. Teach us that if we do thee wrong we do ourselves wrong-no man can grieve the Spirit without also endangering the soul itself. We commend one another again to thy great care, to thy gentle patience, to thy long-suffering and thy perpetual kindness; it is a sea without a shore, it is a firmament full of stars, it endureth for ever. Therefore do we trust in God and hope in thee, and our expectation is from the heavens. This earth is too small for us, we need the firmament as well as the dry land; and shall not the firmament itself become too narrow for our growing powers, for our enlarging capacities, for our heightening and ever-purifying desires? We believe we shall need all thy heaven, and it is our joy to know that in our Father's house are many mansions. Help us, therefore, to yield ourselves to the inspiration of God, to follow the gentle lure of thy Holy Spirit, that we may come into the fulness of the estate of Christian manhood, being perfected in every power, and sanctified in every capability and every energy. Pardon our sins; every day exercise thine infinite prerogative of forgiveness; dismiss us from thy presence as pardoned ones, besprinkled with atoning blood-as men who, having by faith touched the Cross and confessed their sins, are free evermore from the burden and the torment of guilt. Give thy servants understanding of their business, comprehension of the times; excite their best ambition, influence their purest desires, satisfy their noblest expectations. Thus within the narrow scope of time may every one labour well with industry continuous, and with hope that cannot be quenched. When our poor short day upon earth is done may we find that it was no day at all, but a brief night previous to the infinite morning. Amen.

W

Chapter viii. 36.

"He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul."

THE SELF-DESTROYER.

HAT is the particular truth of the text? It is that sin

is not only an offence to God, whom no man hath seen nor can see, but it is a distinct and irreparable injury to the man, the sinner, himself. "Whoso sinneth against me, doth not wrong me only, but wrongeth himself." And that is the only way to get hold of man. Oh, the infinite cunning, the infinite subtlety, the holy inspiration of this immortal volume! Tell a man that by sinning he is hurting the unseen God, and what does he care? You can only get hold of a man in so far as any truth you teach or any requisite you demand impinges upon himself. Touch the little Self, and you have put a hook in the nose of leviathan. That is the subject, that to do wrong is not only to do an injury to an unseen spirit, but to do a positive injury to the man guilty of that wrong himself.

There is a plant, and I say to the sun, "I am not any longer going to be under obligation to you; I am going to keep this plant in the cellar," and I take down the plant that ought to be in the very middle of the garden, miles away from any shadow, and say to the sun, "I am going to do without you." Do I injure the sun? Not at all. What do I injure? The plant. The sun says, "I want to shine upon that plant, and to bring out of its juices all the beauty that is hidden there, and I would do so if you would allow me: whoso, plant of any kind, sins against me, or is made to sin against me, wrongs itself; does not wrong me, does not impair my shining. My light shall be as pure and lavish as ever, but the plant that is withdrawn from my shining shall die." And the sun blazes on, performing his circuit and accomplishing his appointed work.

I say to Nature, "You have given me two arms; I am going to bind one of them to my side and never to use it. My purpose is to do as well as I can with one arm and one hand." What does Nature say? Nature says, "I meant you to use both arms; if you do not use both those limbs you will not injure me—

Nature; you will set aside my purpose; you will destroy the limb." But cannot I bind my arm to my side and keep it there while I please, and allow it to hang there, and then let it grow as it may be able? "No," Nature says, "no." The everlasting ordinances of God, written on Sinai, written in the dust, written in the air, written everywhere, say "No." Whoso sinneth against physiological law wrongeth his own nature, his own flesh and blood, and he shall feel, in manifold penalty, in excruciating pain, in gradual and irresistible decay, that he has violated eternal law. That is the distinct teaching of the text. He that sinneth against wisdom, Christ, truth, light, purity, wrongeth his own soul, commits suicide, brings himself to an untimely death and a dishonoured grave.

It may be difficult to show men that they ought not to sin against a being whom they have never seen, or against spiritual and moral laws which they had no share in determining. Man may under those circumstances get up a kind of metaphysical defence against such obedience; but this unhappy possibility is met and overruled by the unalterable and appalling fact that not to obey is to suffer, to sin is to decline and perish, to go away from truth and purity and honour is to go into darkness and shame and intolerable torment. That is the tremendous hold which God has over us. Understand that God's argument with man is not an affair of words which may be twisted by strong and skilful reasoners in any shape and direction which their genius may suggest; God's hold over us is this, that if a branch be cut out of the vine no man on earth can save it from decay. And the appeal of the divine Being is to facts; the great contention of Christianity with us is not as to a set of notions— their metaphysical value, their philosophical relationship to one another, and their general bearing on the civilisation of the day the great argument to man is this-He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned. The issue is sharp enough: there is no room there for quibbling and shuffling; we are shut up against a granite wall, higher than we can measure with the eye, wider than any line of ours can bring to figures. This is the argument which can soon be brought to the test; a child can prove it—no giant can escape it. I propose,

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then, to bring you upon ground that is very narrow-to shut you up to an argument that you cannot escape from and be fair to the first principles of justice, to the elements of common honesty.

You have a strong emotional nature; you allow that. You cannot deny it if you are sane. My question immediately following your admission is, What are you going to make of it? You can laugh, cry, grieve, rejoice; you can show anger, sympathy, feeling of every kind: you have a tremendous steam power in you-what are you going to do with it? The question is not, Will you have it?-you have got it. To what use will you put it? Suppress it? Then you will wrong your own soul. Turn it towards low objects? Then you will debase one of the highest gifts of your nature. You must use it; you have

it without your own consent, and the question which you have to answer must answer-practically or verbally, or both, is, What are you going to make of that emotional nature of yours? It is the grand motive power of your being; you have passion, you have enthusiasm, you can weep bitterly, you can laugh triumphantly and rejoicingly-what are you going to do with that dynamic power of human life? Are you going to despise emotion? That is the first sign of your falling. Are you— as the apostle describes some persons whom he knew-past feeling? Then you are very nearly in perdition; one step more and the outer darkness encloses you within its infinite fold, from which there is no escape.

If you do not touch a man emotionally you do not get the man at all. So long as he is merely arguing, contending, defending himself intellectually and logically against certain mental assaults, you may silence the man, but you will get no good out of him. Touch his emotion, move his heart, be master of his tears, keep the secret of his joy, and then you are master of him. Christ's grand appeal is to our feeling, our emotion, our homage, our loyalty: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." The intellect itself is thus turned into an organ of devotion. If you suppress your emotion you will go down in the quality and the quantity of your being. You will desiccate your soul-that

is to say, you will take out of it all the vital juices, and you will become a mere thing, an article with a price attached to it, a life that has no immortality, a soul devoid of hope-without hope because without God in the world.

Observe-it is possible to suppress emotion: it is possible to say to your tears, "I do not want you;" it is possible to say to your laughter, "I shall never call you into operation;" it is possible to take a knife and cut out of the soul, so to speak, its grand emotional power. Some men seem to have done this; you never saw a hearty expression of emotion in all your intercourse with them it is all dry, arithmetical, superficial, many inches deep in dust; wanting in the holy enthusiasm, the fiery passion, the tender emotion, which after all conquers and elevates the world. "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul," tears the stops out of the great organ of his being, and then expects that organ to play as voluminously, as powerfully, as tenderly and delicately as if he had not torn out of their places the stops that were needful to give full expression to the powers of his soul.

, You have a great imaginative nature; the question is not, Will you have an imagination? You have it. Then the inquiry comes instantly upon that fact, What are you going to do with your imaginative nature? You cannot live within the narrow circle of things visible; you must, speaking generally-alas! there are exceptional instances-you must wonder about the unseen, the distant, and the future, if you are true to your instincts and to begin to wonder in any intelligent and just manner is to begin to worship. Give me a man who sometimes says, feeling a pressure of the brain he can hardly bear, "I wonder what is beyond that blue veil, that stellar dome, that mystic night, that far and inaccessible horizon?" Give me a man who shall put these questions, express these wonders, and I say to him, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." Wonder may be the beginning of worship What are you going

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to do with your imagination? I will tell you what you can do with it: you can take a knife and cut its wings off, and let it labour and perish in the dust; you can keep your imagination at

VOL. XIII.

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