of disobedience. Not his safety and happiness merely, but his glory and his inheritance lay in this, that he was the son of God' (Luke iii. 38). What could disobedience and distrust mean but the loss of his birthright? When Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, he did but repeat what Adam and Eve had done in Eden. Only his was a baser hunger: theirs was hunger of the mind, thirst for forbidden knowledge, longing to be as gods, knowing good and evil.'

Some eminent preachers and writers have revived the fashion —not a new, but a very old one-of treating the story of Eden as an allegory, a sacred parable or myth. No hint of this occurs in Scripture. Neither the Apostle Paul, nor our Lord Himself, speaks as if he were aware of it. Still, there might be no great practical mischief in this view if people grasped the spiritual teaching of the narrative. But it is the great Scripture doctrine of the FALL OF MAN which is at present widely questioned or rejected. Perhaps this is not surprising when one sees what shallow thinking is brought to bear on it. and Eve,' it is objected, 'were mere children. How could it be just to hang on their misconduct-poor simple creatures!such tremendous consequences?'

'Children!' In experience, we may allow, they were so, though not in faculty. More than the beauty of ideal childhood was theirs; a more spotless purity, a more irrepressible joyfulness, a more boundless hope. But they were GOD'S CHILDREN; in immediate personal communion with the Father of spirits. We set up a wholly false standard if we take the greatness and glory of human nature to consist in either intellectual or material wealth-what we call 'science and civilization.' It consists in CHARACTER. Do you consider what a glorious creature a perfectly holy, loving, obedient, sinless CHILD would be? One such there has been-the child JESUS. Would not, in His case, a single sin have been an irreparable, infinite calamity? It would have barred redemption, and ruined a second time the human race. It is no old-world myth, but a truth that lies at the very heart of human nature, side by side with the fact that we are the offspring of God, that by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.'

Set side by side with the Bible account of the birth and birthright of man, the hypothesis at present widely accepted as science that mankind emerged by slow degrees from the life of beasts, learning by cannibalism to be humane, by animal gibberings to speak and reason, and by the practice of all vice to know and approve virtue. Compared with the doctrine that 'we are the offspring of God,' what can we pronounce it but a loathsome fable, a grotesque superstition? It has not even the

attraction of holding out hope for man's future. That men have crept and crawled thus high above the beasts, would be no proof that they are destined to climb higher. The greatest races of reptiles, birds, mammals, are extinct. The mightiest among their surviving successors-whales, ostriches, elephants—are fast disappearing. As to the human race, the nations now leading the van and ruling the world are incomparably superior to their predecessors in knowledge, and in the power which knowledge confers. But in bodily strength, beauty, intellect, genius, artistic skill, we are immensely inferior to nations that long ago played out their part and vanished. It is not true that the fittest survive,' unless you merely mean that those who survive survive.

If there is hope for man's future even here on earth, we must draw it from EDEN and from CALVARY; from his original birthright as God's offspring, and from the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. 'What the law could not do '-neither natural law nor spiritual-'in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit' (Rom. viii. 3, 4).

RUSKINIANA.

(Continued from p. 402.)

EUSTACE CONDER.

MAN'S USE AND FUNCTION.

MAN'S use and function (and let him who will not grant me this follow me no farther, for this I purpose always to assume) are, to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.

Whatever enables us to fulfil this function is, in the pure and first sense of the word, Useful to us; pre-eminently therefore, whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist are, in a secondary and mean sense, useful; or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are useless, and worse, for it would be better that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence.

And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands, and food and raiment, were alone useful, and as if Sight, Thought, and Admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utili

tarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that it is to give them wood to hew, and water to draw, that the pine-forests cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and the great rivers move like His eternity. And so come upon us that Woe of the preacher, that though God hath made everything beautiful in His time, also He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.'

This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends men to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance, faith: but when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem to arise out of their rest; evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear, also, a fear greater than of sword and sedition: that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water sure; that gratitude to Him may cease, because His constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vain glory, and love in dissimulation; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colours its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunderstricken maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent,

and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust.

And though I believe that we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial, in all directions however distant. And at this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea, when their great net is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufactures; when there is not a monument throughout the cities of Europe that speaks of old years and mighty people, but it is being swept away to build cafés and gaming-houses; when the honour of God is thought to consist in the poverty of His temple, and the column is shortened and the pinnacle shattered, the colour denied to the casement and the marble to the altar, while exchequers are exhausted in luxury of boudoirs and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without a pause all the loveliness of creation which God in giving pronounced Good, and destroy without a thought all those labours which men have given their lives and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail; there is need, bitter need, to bring back into men's mind, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to know Him by whom we live; and that He is not to be known by marring His fair works, and blotting out the evidence of His influences upon His creatures; not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which he gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty, He did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation, that we might give the work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer; He has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under, as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; He brings not up his quails by the east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven. -M. P., II. Pt. iii. sec. 1, ch. i. § 7.

I NEVER demoralize anyone, but always seek out the good that is in them, and leave what is bad to Him Who made mankind, and knows how to round off the angles.-Goethe's Mother.

YORKSHIRE MINISTERS OF A BYGONE

TIME.

BY THE REV. S. GOODALL.

PART I.

I AM a Yorkshireman, and though it is now more than forty years since I ceased to reside in Yorkshire, I have a good many remembrances of ministers, some of whom I knew more or less intimately, and others of whom I knew only in their public capacity. I recall, too, some stories of men who were before my day. Perhaps a few of these stories and recollections may not be wholly uninteresting to the readers of the Evangelical Magazine.

It is a question anxiously pondered by some ministers how soon they may preach their 'old sermons' without being found out, or without their hearers objecting, when they do find it out, to what is in Scotland somewhat irreverently designated 'cauld kail made het.' 'A. K. H. B.,' in a paper which appeared some years ago in Fraser's Magazine, said he thought people might be fairly trusted to forget all about a sermon in four years, and that then it might be safely reproduced without recognition by anybody. For my own part, I am rather doubtful about that. It is quite true that some hearers have a marvellous power of forgetting; but then, on the other hand, there are those who have an equally marvellous power of remembering. Now and then, too, some inconveniently systematic hearer marks in his Bible. every text his minister preaches about; and down goes his mark, no matter how frequently a text may have been marked before. In such cases, however, it is the text which is remembered rather than the sermon. They are very unreasonable people indeed, who, when their minister is hard pressed by other work undertaken in God's service, or when he is out of health, will not now and then excuse an old sermon. Still, if a man reproduce his old sermons often, and even within a far longer period than four years, he need scarcely wonder if his people think him lacking in inspiration. One good man

in the Yorkshire Dales, however, turned the tables on some dissatisfied hearers of his very adroitly. They complained that he had so frequently reproduced some sermons, which they specified, that they were quite tired of them. He heard what they had to say, and then replied, 'You are somewhat fickle. These are the self-same sermons with which, when I first came, you were so much delighted, and yet you say you are now tired of them! What the complainers said in reply is not recorded;