now it may come in its degree with reference to some special sin? Know that it is not natural that you should steal, that you should lie; get rid of the first awful assumption that it is bound up with your constitution, cease to be a weak fatalist about it. That

is the first thing. And then launch bravely forth into brave works of positive honesty and truth. Insist that your life shall not merely deny some falsehood, but that it shall assert some truth. Then, not till then, shall the lie let you go, and your soul count it impossible ever again to do wonderful, almost incredible, that it ever should have done-what once it used to do from day to day.

I think that there are few things about our human nature which are more constantly marvellous than its power of acclimating itself in moral and spiritual regions where it once seemed impossible that it should live at all. The tree upon the hillside says: "Here and here alone can I live. Here my fathers lived in all their generations. Into this hard soil they struck their roots, and drank their sustenance out of its rocky depths. Take me down to the plain and I shall die." The gardener knows better. He takes the doubting and despairing plant and carries it, even against its will, to the broad valley, and sets it where the cold winds shall not smite it, and where the rich ground feeds it with luxuriance. And almost as they touch each other the ground and the root claim one another, and rich revelations of its own possibility flood the poor plant and fill it full of marvel with itself.

Of less and less consequence and meaning seem

to me those easy things which men are always saying about their own natures and character. "I have no

spiritual capacity," says one. "It is not in me to be a saint," another cries. "I have a covetous soul. I cannot live except in winning money." "I can make many sacrifices, but I cannot give up my drink." "I can do many things, but I cannot be reverent.' So the man talks about himself. Poor creature, does he think that he knows, down to its centre, this wonderful humanity of his? It all sounds so plausible and is so untrue! "Surely the man must know himself and his own limitations." Why must he? How can he know what lurking power lies packed away within the never-opened folds of this inactive life? Has he ever dared to call himself the child of God, and for one moment felt what that involves? Has he ever attacked the task which demands those powers whose existence he denies, or tried to press on into the region where those evil things cannot breathe which he complacently declares are an inseparable portion of his life? There is nothing on earth more seemingly significant and more absolutely insignificant than men's judgment of their own moral and spiritual limitations.

When the fallacy has been exposed, when the man has become something which he used to go about declaring that it was absolutely impossible that he should ever be, or has cast finally away that which he has counted a very part and portion of his life, it is often very interesting to see how he thinks of his castoff sin. He, if he is a true man, counts his escape complete, but he never forgets his old bondage. He

is always one whom God has led "out of the land of Egypt." Egypt is still there, although he has escaped from it. Egypt did not cease to be when the Egyptians with whom he had to do fell dead. Men are still doing the sin which has now become impossible for him. He understands those men by his past, while he cannot imagine himself sharing their life today. He is full of sympathy with the sinner, which is one with, of the same substance as, his security against the sin. Pity and hopefulness and humility and strength all blend into the peaceful and settled composure of his life.

It is a noble attitude towards a dead sin. You look into its dead face and are almost grateful to it. Not with a gratitude which makes you any way more tolerant of its character. You hate it with your heart but look! Has it not given you self-knowledge, and made you cry out to God and set your face towards the new life?

My friends, get something done! Get something done! Do not go on forever in idle skirmishing with the same foe. Realize, as you sit here, who your chief enemy is, what vice of mind or body, what false or foul habit. Cry out to God for strength. Set your face resolutely to a new life in which that vice shall have no part. Go out and leave it dead. Plenty of new battles and new foes, but no longer that battle and that foe! Get something done! May He who overcame, not merely for Himself but for us all, give you courage and make you sharers in His victory and in the liberty which He attained.

V.

THE BATTLE OF LIFE.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."- EPHESIANS vi. 12.

"THE Battle of Life" is a metaphor which almost all men at some time in their lives realize and own as true. It suggests a picture which recalls to almost every man his own history, if his has been at all an earnest life. We may think that it has not been so with other men; we may look at some bright and smiling life, and say with something of envy, with something also almost like reproach in our tone, "Lo, life has no battle for him! Behold how smooth and easy all the world has been for him!" The man himself knows better. And we, if we come close to him, can see the scars, nay, we can hear the battle of his life still going on. But whether we come close enough to him to know the real truth of his life or not, we know the truth about our own. Life is a battle. Forever on the watch against our enemies, forever guarding our own lives, forever watching our chance. for an attack upon the foe, so we all live if we are

earnest men.

And this universal consciousness of battle is true to the figure by which we illustrate it in this,

that

it affects different fighters in different ways, it inspires them with most various emotions. To one man the fact of the struggle of life is a perpetual exhilaration upon another it weighs with an almost intolerable oppressiveness. To one man the eversounding battle bugle calling men always to the fight, brings a dismay which paralyzes every power: another man it seems to distract into the wildest folly, and he rushes everywhere, striking at random at friend or foe. It has no uniform effect. It catches each man as it finds him, and inspires him according to his character.

But metaphors are delusive, and if we cling too long and closely to them they grow tiresome. They are very apt often to blind us to the need of careful definition and discrimination. This metaphor, for instance, Life a Battle, may seem so satisfactory that it may lead us to forget that there are all kinds of battles, that we do not know much about a battle until we understand who the enemy is and what the weapons are. Two tribes of savages hewing away at each other in the jungle, the host of crusaders contending with the soldiers of the prophets on the great plain of Galilee, the Swiss peasants fighting for freedom in their mountain fastnesses, our soldiers struggling with rebellion, — all these are battles; but how different they are! Evidently, before the old metaphor, "the Battle of Life," can mean anything very definite or practical to us, we must open it with the sharp knife of a question. We must ask who is the enemy with whom the battle of life is being fought.