the highest Christian excellence: this of "The Blessed Life" has been selected from among them; first, because sanctioned by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount; and, further, because it denotes the subject in that aspect of it which is most apt to win the young heart.

The way to bliss is the most interesting and oftenest repeated question of the ages. Every intelligent spirit desires happiness and hates misery. Men earnest in the pursuit have searched every forest, beat every bush, and analysed every substance in nature to find it. The wing of Genius has not reached it, nor the arm of Industry won it, nor the keen eye of Science penetrated its secret. The marvels of discovery, the curiosities of learning, the flowers of poetry, the gauds of fashion, the badges of honour, the treasures of wealth, the changes of travel, the achievements of adventure, the reciprocations of converse, the dulcet sounds of music, the glances of beauty, the flagons of wine, all-all have been tried-and all alike have failed to insure it. Your heart may be too bad for God to live in, but, assuredly, it is too big for the creature to fill. The things we have mentioned as little strengthen and sustain the soul as wind for drink and fogs for food would do the flesh. Merely animal delights, which seduce and ruin such crowds of youth, remind us of one of Ariosto's romantic legends. He tells of a tree, many-branched, and covered with delectable-looking bunches; but whoso shook that tree to win the fruit found, too late, that not fruit, but stones of crushing weight came down upon his head. The sensualities, which fools call pleasure, are such a tree. They who seek its fruit become its victims.

That godly life is blessed life is not popularly believed. Nor is this to be wondered at. How can men unreconciled and unrenewed know? They have felt strivings of the Spirit, woundings of conscience, fear of death, dread of

judgment, horror of eternity, and most unreasonably argue as if these painful things were samples of what religion is. But, plainly, these things arise-not from the possession, but-from the lack of religion. As wisely might a sick man form his estimate of health from the cut of a lancet, the bitterness of pills and potions, or the torments of a blister.

Dr. Barrow truly testifies of religion when he says, "It alone is the never-failing source of true, pure, steady joy; such as is deeply rooted in the heart, immovably founded in the reason of things, permanent like the immortal spirit wherein it dwelleth, and unapt to fade and cloy like the eternal objects whereon it is fixed."

How often and how strangely has the very essence of religion been mistaken. Many have minified it into a matter of rubric, a mere thing of ceremony, a set of cunningly devised bodily inflexions. They have converted the sanctuary into a theatre, and turned the Eucharist itself into a show. The self-examination of such turns upon ritual exactness, and grave observance of canonical hours. The service ended, the goal is reached, and, if they do not err, you are religious!

Others have shrivelled religion up into a set of dry and fruitless opinions. A chilled and icy self-asserted orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which after all only means their doxy, wins from them the esteem which is due to holiness alone. Barney Roche heard, unmoved, that one of the companions of his youth had become a thief; but when told that another had turned Methodist, the rumour of apostasy so sad awoke horror which the tale of immorality had failed to stir. "Ugh!" said he with disgust, "and is the spalpeen so bad as that now? Sure, it is all over with the villain, and he is the Devil's own entirely!" Poor Barney, in thus speedily handing the wanderer over to Beelzebub, only followed in the wake of many an anathematising pope and doctor, who,

if a man, however Christlike, could not say all their Shibboleths, and pass muster on each and every of their thousand and one sharp points of school divinity, cursed him as savagely, and we may well believe as impotently, as Goliath of Gath did David.

Multitudes have fallen into the mistaken notion that religion cannot live amid the rough realities of common life. Hence the absurd praise heaped upon celibacy and solitude. These things, however, being impossible to the million, in all communities where such ideas prevail two scales of morality are believed in-the common and the perfect; and the ascetics, who follow what are called "the counsels of perfection," much to the peril of their humility, are accustomed to look on all ordinary folk as secular, and to absorb in themselves not only the honour but even the very name of "the religious." That was a glorious sentiment of Martin Luther," Holiness consisteth not in a cowl or a garment of grey. When God purifies the heart by faith the market is sacred as well as the sanctuary. Neither remaineth there any work or place which is profane." Alas! many found that Satan was not left behind at the monastery door; that the old heart still beat under the monk's hood; that sin could live as easily in cell as city. Be well assured idleness is no help to holiness, and fleeing the duties we owe to man no way to get nearer to God.

As the essence of religion, so also the nature of the divine life has been much misunderstood.

The mystic, thinking the soul to be an emanation from God, and accounting the body to be its cross and clog, spends all his strength in attempts to withdraw himself from sense, to attain quietness of spirit and contemplative union with God. He is wholly taken up with an interior world.

The devotee thinks and speaks of earth as a place of exile;

to him daily work is drudgery, and things visible are nothing but shadows and snares. He is wholly taken up with a future world.

The secularist, a noisy bustler, loudly lets you know that he is no dreamer; he is wide awake; he believes in common sense and minds his business like a man. He is wholly taken up with the present world.

Now, each of these has a fragment of the truth; but they are like boys who have mischievously taken a watch to pieces and cannot, for the life of them, either put it together again or make the isolated fragments go. They want some all-combining truth in the unity of which rite, and creed, and thought, relations to the inner world, the outer world, and the unseen world, will all find a centre, a support, and a rule of proportion.

That truth is found in the parable where the Saviour tells of a lord who called his servants, delivered unto them his goods, and, leaving with them the simple direction, "Occupy till I come," straightway took his journey into a far country.

That parable beautifully expresses the divine ideal of life. We are the Lord's. Life with all that life implies is a trust. Every endowment is a "talent" committed to us, for the use of which the great Master will hold us responsible. Every hour belongs to Him. In every employment we should serve Him. Our rule of value should be the relation of things to the furtherance of His plans. We only judge rightly when our estimate agrees with that which He will give in the final award.

future and indefinite.

As in the parable, so in life; He who has imposed the trust is out of sight. When He will require account is This invisibility of the Master and remoteness of the day of reckoning, leave it possible for heedless people to act and feel as if they were unobserved

and irresponsible, and, at the same time, furnish to faithful servants the best possible opportunity to manifest their faith, their conscientiousness, and their unwearying love.

Our personal possibilities-physical, mental, moral—are a trust. The body is a trust. Virgil's horrid tale of Mezentius, who fettered living men to loathsome carcases, had Platonic teaching been true, would have found its counterpart in every man. According to his theory, the spirit alone was the man. The body was a dungeon; corporeity, a curse; the flesh a filthy mire, into which the soul unhappily had fallen, and where miserably it wallowed.

Plotinus, thus believing, when besought by his friends to sit for a portrait, replied that, blushing as he did to have a body at all, he thought it bad enough to carry the shameful load without bequeathing the semblance of it to after times. Again, when his disciples, could they have learned it, would have celebrated the anniversary of his birth, he refused to tell the name of either father, mother, or town, assuring them that he would rather bewail than make festival about his coming into flesh.

No contrast can be stronger than that between this language of contempt and hatred and the reverential and honourable terms used by sacred writers on the same subject. How opposite to all this, the blessed fact of the Saviour's incarnation and the glorious Christian hope of resurrection!

The material organism hath its claims. Many a good deed was done by Jesus to the bodies of men. Our duty in respect of the body is threefold: first, to keep it pure. "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin." Then, so far as in us lies, to promote and maintain its vigour. Theology is not speechless, even upon Hygiene.