(Hab. ii. 5); of the poor in their deep poverty, sinking into more and more hopeless brutality and degradation. And neither care to learn a parable from the fig-tree (Mark xiii. 28, 29) or look up and lift their heads, as though a "redemption" from a life, in which all the conditions of health are reversed, "were nigh," or even possible.

Yet here, from this place, speaking to the young heart of England, to those who will be the strength and stay both of the Church and of the Nation, both of Religion and of Society, when we, whose sun has passed its meridian height and is now sloping towards the west, shall be sleeping in our quiet or unquiet graves, one would fain try to rouse spirits that cannot yet be fully steeped in the narcotic, deadening influences of the world, to an adequate sense of what an apostle calls "their high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

"He went about doing good," is at once the simplest and truest description of the work which the Lord Jesus set Himself to do upon this earth. "To go about doing good," wherever his hand finds good to do,—and he will not need to look far for opportunities-is the surest token still of a man having the mind of Christ; of a man having his spirit touched by the Spirit of Christ. To wrap oneself up in an isolating selfishness, to stop our ears and close our eyes to everything likely to disturb the softness of our slumbers, the sweetness of our dreams, to say to our soul (if such be our portion), "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry;" this, even men who have no spirit of faith, see to be a temper as

alien from the proper temper of a Christian as anything can be conceived to be. Yet this is the temper which the luxurious, self-indulgent habits of the age have an almost irresistible tendency to form. You must exercise conscious efforts of watchfulness, and self-restraint, if you would struggle successfully against their slumberous, paralysing influence. "A useless life," said Goethe, "is but an early death.” (Ein unnutz Leben ist ein früher Tod.) Many of your young hearts are leaping up with wild, and as yet unfixed, ambitions. You naturally and rightly desire to make your mark on your generation, to hand down your names to them that come after, as those who have been among the foremost men of their time. I know not whom you have selected from the page of history, by whose career to fashion your own. But if the ideal of Jesus Christ be deemed too high—and, of course, it is so far too high that no mortal man can hope to attain to it—you could not probably propose to yourselves a nobler example to be conformed to than that of Paul. I do not mean in what may be termed the accidents of his life (for you may be called to far other work than his): but in what constitutes the moral basis of his character, its chivalry, its generosity, its tenderness, its true refinement, its almost superhuman devotion to duty, its sustaining faith in the unseen. Souls of this stamp are what our diseased social condition emphatically demands; souls, willing to spend, and be spent for a noble cause; souls loving on, even though winning back scant love in return; souls steadfast though standing alone, firm where others waver, loyal where others betray, because

"they know in whom they have believed, and are persuaded that He is able to keep that which they have committed unto Him against that day.”

And so we are brought back to the thought with which we began. We need hopes "entering into that within the veil"-reaching beyond the confines of this lower world-to sustain, in a day when "our tokens are not so clearly to be seen" as once they were, fainting hearts and drooping hands. "If in this life only we had hopes in Christ, we should be of all men the most miserable." We shall hardly make the use of our five talents, or of our single pound (if that be all that has been intrusted to us), that we ought to do, unless we believe that the Master, Whom we serve, will one day come and reckon" with us. No need to ask captiously or querulously, "What are the signs of His coming?" nor again, "Will His reward when He bestows it satisfy us for all the toil that we have borne ?" The value of the reward will depend upon the expectations we are forming of it. If we are dreaming of places "at the right hand or the left," perhaps they never may be ours. If our hearts are set upon some gross, almost material and sensual payment in kind, that certainly never will be ours either. But if we have so longed to see Him “in His beauty" here, that hereafter to "see Him as He is " will suffice us, we shall have that. If it be enough to share His joy, though we know not of what sort it be, we shall have that for our portion too. If, by heaven, we mean a place where there shall be infinite scope for almost infinite development of all that is best, and purest, and noblest in our nature, that heaven shall

F

be ours. This much we are told plainly and without figure; and more than this we need not ask nor care to know. We must not elevate the reward into the rank of a primary motive; it is but a subsidiary support to a frail and wavering heart. The work itself carries with it the highest, the most abiding reward. No prize, either in earth or heaven, so rich as that which the conscience offers, unasked, unprompted, to him who simply strives to do his duty. "Thus," according to the beautiful thought of the Christian Year (Advent Sunday),

"Thus bad and good their several warnings give Of His approach, whom none may see and live; Faith's ear, with awful still delight,

Counts them like minute bells at night,

Keeping the heart awake till dawn of morn,

While to her funeral pile this aged world is borne.

"But what are heaven's alarms to hearts that cower In wilful slumber, deepening every hour,

That draw their curtains closer round,

The nearer swells the trumpet sound?

Lord, ere our trembling lamps sink down and die,

Touch us with chastening hand, and make us feel Thee nigh."

Preached-St. Mary's, Oxford, October 29, 1871.

VI.

THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF MIRACLES.

(As a Motive Power in Spiritual Life.)

"Then certain of the Scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master we would see a sign from Thee." - ST. MATTHEW Xii. 38.

ON examining the records of Holy Scripture which contain the story of miraculous events, I cannot help arriving at the conclusion, that the evidential value of miracles, as a basis of belief, is and always was, considerably less than is commonly assumed or supposed. Not only do we read the story, and dwell on the thought, of them now, less as proofs of a revelation, than as illustrations of the character of Him who partly by and partly with them, was revealing Himself to man : less as τέρατα or even δυνάμεις than as σημεία (the word by which they are most frequently designated); less as tokens of a physical, than of a moral, governor of the world-but it would seem to have been always so. When Jesus raised the widow's son at Nain, there came a fear—an awe-inspiring, reverent fear-upon all; and they glorified God, saying "that a great prophet is risen