feel who, though they have escaped the taint of evil, have known and been tried by its power.

Perhaps, as Bishop Butler has pointed out, our conception of Almighty God as of a Being of pure benevolence is an incomplete, and therefore an erroneous one. He who has made Himself known as a God of love has also revealed Himself, and on the page of the Gospel too, as "a consuming fire." It is an idle, and indeed not a very innocent employment, to ask why He who made all things good does not more visibly interfere to reconstruct His world after a pattern presumed to be more in accordance with the recognised features of His character. "Perhaps," says Bishop Butler, "there may be some impossibilities in the nature of things which we are unacquainted with. Or less happiness, it may be, would on the whole be produced by such a method of conduct than is by the present. Or perhaps the Divine goodness, with which, if I mistake not, we make very free in our speculations, may not be a bare, single disposition to make the good, the faithful, the honest man happy. Perhaps an infinitely perfect Mind may be pleased with seeing His creatures behave suitably to the nature which He has given them; to the relations which He has placed them in to each other, and to that in which they stand to Himself: that relation to Himself which, during their existence, is even necessary, and which is the most important of all: perhaps, I say, an infinitely perfect Mind may be pleased with this moral piety of moral agents in and for itself, as well upon account of its being essentially conducive to the happiness of His creation. Or,

the whole end for which God made and thus governs the world may be utterly beyond the reach of our faculties there may be something in it as impossible for us to have any conception of as for a blind man to have a conception of colours."

Whatever be the hypothesis, the fact of the actual constitution of things remains and what is more, it is the fact with which we, as moral agents, have to deal; and upon our mode of dealing with which the formation of our present character, as we find by actual experience, and the determination of our future destiny, as we are taught in the page of revelation, principally depend. In that magnificent vision which is unfolded of the King upon His throne, dispensing, in the presence of the innumerable angels, the award proportioned to the work of every man, of “what sort soever it has been," the ground of acceptance or rejection is the character, shown by the eye which men have cast upon the various forms of human suffering: whether they have sought out, or endeavoured to avoid, objects of sympathy: whether they have heard, or passed unheeding by, calls for aid; whether or not in the disguise of some poor, shivering, tattered, emaciated fellow-creature they have discovered their Master's form; whether in the great parable of life they have played the part of the Priest and Levite, who passed by painful cases that they encountered, shrugging their shoulders, regretting them, able, possibly, to draw down tears of sympathy as they told the piteous tale, their own hearts all untouched the while; or shared his nobler spirit who, finding a wounded, half-dead traveller on the road,

"went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him."

Surely, if Christ's words be true, they will be nearest to Him, when He sits upon His throne, who have been likest to Him; who have imitated His character and conduct in those points in which, to frail, sinful men, it was most imitable; who, as He, have gone about doing good," and healing, as far as God had given them the gift, all or any of those who "were oppressed of the devil."

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The heathen, who had nothing to console himself withal but the fragments of a shattered faith, which lived on its feeble life, apart from the illuminating influences of a divinely authenticated law, and anterior to the dawning of the Gospel day, looked out upon a world that seemed to him a chaos, with feelings little, if at all, higher than despair. The earth had lost its youth, its freshness, its beauty. The age of iron had come. Nor day nor night was rest from woe. The gods themselves grudged mortal men their brief, rare, intermittent happiness. Degeneracy was the law imposed by fate on all things. As one of their own prophets sang,

"Thus from bad to worse

All things are backward borne, by God's hand doomed."

It is easy to see how such a faith, or rather such a conviction-for there was nothing in it of the hopeful temperament of faith-must have prostrated all human

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energy; must have made men utterly self-seeking, and living for the hour; must have reduced the list of possible virtues; must have arrested the progress of all improvement by deadening the conscience, chilling the affections, blunting and enervating the sympathies of the soul.

Before the "enthusiasm of humanity," as it has been called, can be raised to any very high energy, you and I must get rid of the depressing influence of the heathen creed, that this earth is lying under God's curse is unimproveable; and we must believe that the Father of lights, "with whom is no variableness nor even shadow of turning," is working out through us, in our place and degree as His instruments, even as in His place and degree He wrought out by the hands of His Consubstantial Co-eternal Son, "the regeneration of the world."

It is to spiritual, rather than to material, forces that the increase of human purposes and the enlargement of human thought are due. It is the Gospel, penetrating and fashioning what is called "the spirit of the age," that has elevated woman. It was the Gospel that struck the fetters from the slave. It is the Gospel that has mitigated, and is mitigating still, the horrors and barbarities of war-would to God it could make war impossible! It is the Gospel that has replaced the savage instinct of cruelty by the civilised instinct of tenderness. It is the Gospel that created the idea, in its highest sense, of a gentleman. It is the Gospel that proclaimed, without perverting to revolutionary or

communistic ends-without even showing any preference of one form of government to another, but with that wonderful breadth of spirit which made it possible to become the religion of mankind-the great principles that should underlie all government. It is the Gospel that uttered the great political creed of the equality of men, and the great social creed of the fraternity of men. For those whom God hath made of one blood must necessarily be equal, those whom He hath adopted into one family must necessarily be brethren.

I used just now the phrase "the regeneration of the world." I used it advisedly, and in the sense, I believe, in which our Lord Jesus Christ used it, when He spoke to His Apostles of "the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His glory," and when they also should sit on thrones at His side. There is a first regeneration and a second, even as we are told there is a first and a second resurrection. Baptised with the spirit of the first, we must labour to realise, and even to hasten, the glories of the last. Every conquest over evil, whether material or spiritual, whether physical, moral, or social, is an advance towards the "day of the restitution of all things"; is what St. Peter calls “a hasting of the coming of the day of God," in which all the elements of evil which mar this present economy of things shall be burnt up by the "fervent heat" of the purifying fire, and a renewed heaven and a renewed. earth shall be made, meet for the dwelling place of God when He shall "take up His abode " with men.

Every effort that you make for the alleviation of the