natural judgment to pass upon religion, when we have seen it thus associated, is to pronounce the whole thing a sham. That such shams exist here, there, everywhere, and that they justly provoke such scoffs and sneers, is only too notorious. The marvel to me is that men think it worth while to wear such thin disguises, beneath which the true features are only too clearly seen. Can they possibly imagine that God will judge them on the principle of a set-off, as though two tradesmen were settling accounts together?

As I survey the phenomena of the age, the chief fear in my mind for the future of religion is lest it should get dissevered from morality; lest it should become a matter of dogma and ritual, that is, of opinion and sentiment rather than a principle of conduct. It has been truly said that "conduct is three-fourths of life." It is the main affair. Orthodoxy is good, but morality is better. Even truth, when of the purely speculative kind, in the sphere of theosophy or theology, is barren of results, unless it can be made to bear on the regulation of the life and the illumination of the conscience; and worship, unless it expresses and satisfies the yearnings of the soul, unless it is used and felt as a means of access to God, as a vehicle of that grace which we all so sorely need, is nothing better than an organised, though it may be a graceful and attractive, formalism.

It is from this point of view, and not because I have narrow Puritanical ideas upon the subject, that I dread the possible effects of the present extravagant attention to an æsthetic and even sensuous ritualism, which I trust has nearly had its day. It has gone to form a

type of character which, I confess, is not much to my mind. There is a danger, of which St. Paul has warned us, of the forms of Godliness being scrupulously cultivated by those who are yet, in their hearts, strangers to its power. Men and women are making religion rather a matter of special observance than a principle of general self-control. The leaven, if it can be so called, affects a part of their nature only, not the whole. In their souls there are dark, foul chambers, into which the unclean spirit, once perhaps cast forth, has found his way back again or they are haunted by the spectres of sins which they can hardly be said to have forsaken, although they are continually reiterating their confession of them; and instead of revolting the conscience, the memory of them, sometimes deliberately awakened, even gives a languid sense of pleasure to the imagination.

We build sanctuaries, in which we place, not God in any rational conception of His nature, but a fetish whom we worship and think to propitiate; not Christ, the Saviour of all men, specially of them that believe, but a Christ so localised and materialised that a stranger who passed by and beheld our devotion might think we believed in the power of charms and spells; and that His objective presence on an altar is deemed infinitely more precious than His subjective presence in the soul. We think in such sanctuaries, where the air is stifling with the vapid fumes of incense, we can offer to God a higher and more acceptable service than is possible in the outer world of activity and usefulness; where perhaps worship plays a less conspicuous part, but where there is no lack of calls to duty or of motives for

disinterestedness and self-sacrifice.

O that God would

raise up for His Church Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers who would inspire a passion for virtue! The Evangelists we have seem to me to stimulate the sensibilities, but hardly to quicken the conscience.

We have need to close our ranks in defence of virtue. Morals and religion have more to fear from those who attempt to discredit the Sermon on the Mount than from those who express (not always, it is true, in as measured language as one could desire) their dislike of the seeming hardness of some of the statements of the Athanasian Creed. It is time that we understood the meaning of that saying, "The Kingdom of God is not in word, but in power." It is time we appreciated the difference in value between the weightier and the less weighty matter of the law; to use our Lord's own comparison, "between mercy and sacrifice." And so strong is my own confidence in the essential harmony of things, that I feel sure that a clear and authoritative conscience will be found to be the surest safeguard and strongest support to a rational faith; and that he is not likely to wander far, or long, from the precincts of truth who keeps his feet firmly planted in the ways of rectitude.

I do not doubt "that the decomposition of belief which is going on so rapidly among us must—or at least may-involve the most profound, probably sincere, and yet alarming, recast of principles of honour and principles of self-restraint hitherto commonly accepted," and which constitute the substance of ordinary morality. But I believe that "the ethical basis of thought is

deeper than the dogmatic; and to attempt to rehabilitate faith before you have restored the recognition of the supremacy of conscience, is to build a house upon the sand." "If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness." So do not suppose that to preach morality is to empty the Gospel of the grace of God of its proper power, or to supplement the work of Christ by a righteousness of our own. The moral nature of man is the true subject of grace; and Christ is only truly Lord when He is thoroughly obeyed.

Preached Westminster Abbey, June 25, 1876. Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, December 7, 1881. Westminster Abbey, July 5, 1885.

XII.

IMMORTALITY.

"It doth not yet appear what we shall be."-1 ST. JOHN iii. 2.

THIS is Revelation's "last word" on a great subject> which theologians have too often forgotten in their positive statements and assumptions.

Our English version does not quite correctly represent the Greek original. It is not ovπw paiveTai, "it doth not yet appear," as a result of human inference or speculation; but ovπш épaveρón, "it has not yet been manifested or revealed." God Himself still wraps our destiny among His "hidden things."

Even Paul, when wading in these perilous depths, and talking of the "change change" that awaits all, and attempting to describe the properties of a "spiritual body," felt himself to be confronted with a "mystery; and while satisfied that there would be a victory over the grave, and that mortality would be swallowed up in life, wisely brought back his readers' thoughts from dreamland to reality, by bidding them simply " be steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the