Greek word is σepvá, and should have been translated grand, majestic, stately-" anything just, anything pure, anything of good report"—rather, perhaps, any thing with that indefinable character of solemnity about it which. casts a corresponding influence over the soul-they should "think of these things." (Philip. iv. 8.) Putting aside for the moment the idea of justice, all those other ideas-truth, grandeur, purity, loveliness, and the awfulness that hushes the soul-all these are found in our great cathedrals. They are, or ought to be, to us as a type of true nobility of life. If you that I see before me are indeed working men, there must be a contrast obvious to your eyes, my friends, between this grand and lofty and well-proportioned cathedral and your own home-perhaps a home in a dark and cheerless court, where the sun hardly ever shines, where sweet sounds are seldom heard, where you can scarcely find a place to rest and seek quiet communion with God. Well, even that contrast, sharp and painful as it is, is typical; for it portrays the contrast between this life and the next. Yes, friends, there will be a change when the lowest of the sons of toil shall shake off his earthly tabernacle, and all the earthliness that has adhered to it, and shall be clothed upon with that new house prepared for him of God, "eternal in the heavens." The change we look for-the clearness of vision promised to us-the rest after labour, the Sabbath-keeping, as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls it (iv. 9)— the glory—the life of the world to come, all stand in the same startling contrast to the life that you and I and all of us are spending now. I admit that cathedrals have been desecrated. Go where you will-I do not know the traditions of this cathedral-but go to Lichfield, to Bristol, to Exeter, and you shall hear tales told you by the verger who takes you round to show you the sights of his cathedral, of the doings of Cromwell and his troopers, or other iconoclasts of that fanatical time, how they dashed the statues from their niches, how they broke into fragments the stained windows, how they mutilated the curiously-carved stalls or screens, how they stabled their horses in the cloisters. No doubt those men, filled with a wild, unreasoning piety-for though they did profane acts, they were not at heart profane mendid do such things: but, in my judgment, there have been worse desecrations than ever were perpetrated by Cromwell and his soldiery. Cathedrals have been desecrated by those who, having received them as an inheritance, wasted that inheritance; those who dozed out sleepy useless lives under the very shadow of influences which should have had a tendency to inspire every action with a noble motive; those who built a fortune or founded a family out of what was intrusted to them for far other than personal or selfish ends; those who made the very name of a cathedral a synonym for formalism and spiritual death. Happily for us, before it was too late, a higher sense of duty has taken possession of the nation now. Acts that were tolerated, if not applauded, fifty years since, would be impossible to-day. Not only are cathedrals being restored on every side, and there is hardly a cathedral city in England where you will not find that much has been done, or is being done, of the same kind as that which you are doing here-not only, I say, are cathedrals being restored by the patriotic spirit of a generous people, but deans and chapters are awakening, or have awoke, to a sense of the use of them. We cannot afford to spare these purifying, ennobling and (in a secondary sense) sanctifying influences. We must not let cathedrals just yet pass into the rank of "national monuments," like Stonehenge; and become the objects of a mere historical interest or antiquarian curiosity. We have a use for them-a need of them. We have a right to make a complaint of that scepticism -too often atheism in disguise—which, under the pretence of exalting human nature, really degrades it by making man, with his heavy downward-gravitating tendencies, the measure of all things. When Paul tells Christian people to think on things grand and pure, which attract love and produce a solemn hush in the soul, no doubt he meant them to take into their field of vision the best samples of humanity in their fellowmen; but the scepticism of the day refuses to recognise anything higher than man. It will not do, my friends. It will not be enough to keep man even at his present level. He is sure to sink if no higher type is set before him than himself. There are theories floating abroad about mankind having been developed from the lowest form of savagery ; and there are speculators who would persuade us that human nature, having reached its present stage of perfection, can never retrograde. I do not feel so sure of this impossibility. To me the most frightful symptom of the times is the savagery that can be seen existing in the midst of our boasted civilisation. I do not know whether it be so in Chester, but in most great towns and in many country villages, you will find savages as wild and brutal, and in their conduct to their wives and children as little under the discipline of self-controland that without the same excuse-as those South Sea Islanders who martyred Bishop Patteson. Another thing sometimes moves me with alarm. It is the dread of lapsing into a glittering, but yet pagan, barbaric imperialism like that of Rome when, as one satirist of manners tells us, the rich thought happiness consisted in keeping yachts and driving four-in-hand, and the poor, as another adds, cared only for their victuals and the theatres. There is some peril lest, with wealth increasing so rapidly in every class of society without the accompaniment of a capacity to spend it upon proper objects and in a right way, we should relapse into types of life like these. We want Christ in the influence of His high example-Christ in the lofty motives of His religion-Christ in the power of His Spirit-we want Christ "to deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." We want Christ to save us, not only from the devil, but from ourselves. Preached At re-opening of Chester Cathedral, January 30, 1872 VIII. THINGS HARD TO BE UNDERSTOOD. "In which are some things hard to be understood."— IF it has pleased Almighty God to make a revelation, a partial unveiling or manifestation, of Himself to man; it is not an unreasonable nor an impossible hypothesis that the disclosure should still be incomplete; or if not incomplete, in many of its parts at least incomprehensible and mysterious. Even those whom we believe to have been the instruments and media of the revelation, felt that the God who was thus making Himself known was still a God who "hid Himself" from their yearning gaze; that His judgments were unsearchable, His ways past finding out; that they knew in part, and prophesied in part; and their spirits inquired and searched diligently into the time, and method, and scope of that divine plan of salvation which they were commissioned, and felt themselves inspired, to proclaim. "The mystery of godliness," the manifestation of God, whether in the flesh or otherwise, the justification of His ways, whether H |